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THE 

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION OF 

COMTE. 



L 



THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 

AND RELIGION OF 

COMTE. 



BY 

EDWARD ' CAIRD, LL.D., 

PROFESSOR OF MORAL FHILOSOPHY IN THF. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. 



b o 



NEW YORK: 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1885. 






A 



"5^. 












*p£iiratcfc, 



WITH AFFECTION AND ESTEEM, 
MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 

JOHN NICHOL. 



CONTENTS. 

Preface, 



CHAPTER I. 

GENERAL ACCOUNT OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 

Gomte's fundamental principles — Their bearing on his view q/"-- 
history — Decay of theology and of the social system founded 
on it — Metaphysic, its strength for destruction and weakness 
for construction — It prepares the way for positive science, on 
ivl „ the social system of the future must be based — Necessity 
for a new religion based on science — Humanity the true object 
of worship— The social system corresponding to the religion of 
Humanity — Man's intellectual and moral powers evolved in 
conflict with nature — The nature of the social organization 
and the three forms of society, the Family, the State, and the 
Church — The Priesthood of Humanity and its office, - 1-55 

CHAPTER II. 

THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF COMTE's PHILOSOPHY — HIS OPPOSITION 
TO METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 

Growth of a new view of the social organism opposed at once to 
Individualism and Socialism — Comte and the German Idealists 
— Meaning of his attack on Metaphysic — His re al agreement 
with modern meta physician s — He adopts Locke's principles 
as to knoivledge, yet is opposed to the Individualism of Locke's 
French disciples — He attacks Realism as a Nominalist and 
Nominalism as a Realist, and is really guided by a higher 
principle than either — His mistaken attitude towards th & 
Critical Philosophy — Relation of Philosophy to Science — It 
makelTmen conscious of their guiding yrinciyles — Comte' s 
consciousness of the categories /hat guide /its thought — Con 
sequent defects in his view of the development of Religion, of 
Philosophy, and of Science. — Mr. Spencer's criticism and 
Littre"s ansioer — Ambiguity in the opp>osition between the 
universal and the particular, 56-111 




viii Contents. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE POSITIVE OR CONSTRICTIVE SIDE OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY 
— HIS SUBSTITUTES EOR METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 

His recognition of the need of substitutes for Theology and Meta- 
physic — His assertion that his philosophy is relative and subjec- 
tivp^Double meaning of the relativity of knowledge as involving 
ie assertion or the denial of real or absolute knowledge — 
Collision of Comte's earlier and later views on this point — 
Comte's subjective synthesis not subjective in the sense of Indi- 
vidualism, nor yet in the sense that a conscious subject is im- 
plied in all objects — His compromise between these opposite 
theories — His doctrine that man sees the world in ordine ad 
hominem but not in ordine ad universum — Impossibility- 
of separating nature from man and of criticising the whole 
system to vihich man belongs — Defects of Comte's religion"" 
according to his own idea of religion — Schisms in the school of 
Comte, 112-176 



CHAPTER IV. 

COMTE'S VIEW OF THE RELATION OF THE INTELLECT TO THE 
HEART — ITS EFFECT ON HIS CONCEPTION OF HISTORY AND 
OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 

The necessity for unity in man's intellectual and moral life — 
Nature of the conflict between the intelligence and the heart — 
It is really a conflict of intelligence with itself — Criticism of 
Comte's doctrine that the intelligence must he subjected to tin- 
heart — Its effect upon his conception of history, especially of 
the history of Christianity — The two elements in Christianity, 
their conflict and reconciliation in its development — The nega- 
tive tendencies of mediaeval Catholicism and the positive ten- 
dencies of the modern era — Comte's imp erfect conception of the 
Reformalmi and the Revolution — His restoration of the 
mediaeval ideal — His general position as a Philosopher. 

177-249 



PREFACE. 



This volume consists of a series of articles which 
have already appeared in the Contemporary Re- 
view, and which the proprietors of that review 
have kindly permitted me to republish. A few 
paragraphs have been re- written, and a few verbal 
changes introduced to remove obscurity or in- 
accuracy, but the general substance of the articles 
remains unaltered. 

In the following exposition and criticism of 
Comte's philosophy I have considered it mainly, 
though not exclusively, in its ethical and religi- 
ous aspects. I have not attempted to deal with 
the detailed discussion of the nature and methods 
of the sciences contained in the Philosophic Posi- 
tive, except in so far as is necessary for the 
understanding of the Politique Positive, in which 



x Preface. 

the social and religious aims of Comte's philosophy 
are for the first time explicitly stated. Not, 
indeed, that there is any very marked division 
between his earlier and his later treatises. The 
changes observable in the latter do not amount, 
as has sometimes been represented, to a sudden 
revolution, but are rather the last develojnnent 
of tendencies which had been gaining ground in 
Comte's mind as his work advanced, and gradually 
carrying him away from his original principles, 
or at least greatly modifying their first signi- 
ficance. I have preferred, however, to confine 
myself, in the main, to the social philosophy of 
Comte and the restoration of religion connected 
therewith, partly because I have not sufficient 
scientific knowledge to estimate the value of his 
critical review of mathematics and physics, 
chemistry and biology, and partly because, so 
far as I know, there has been very little serious 
criticism of that part of his work which he 
regarded (I think justly) as the most important 
and original. In his earlier treatise, or at least 
in the greater part of it, Comte was working 
upon lines which are common to him with all 
the . representatives of what in the last century 



Preface. xi 

was termed " Enlightenment," and now most 
often goes by the names of " Positivism " or 
" Agnosticism." But the distinctive peculiarity 
of Comte is that he does not stop at that 
negation of metaphysics and theology which is 
characteristic of this school, hut that Ids Posi- 
tivism reproduces both, though in a new form. 
It is, indeed, just this new element in Comte 
which gives a truly " positive " meaning to his 
well-known law of development, which in its 
first form might more truly be described as 
" negative." For in that form all that it dis- 
tinctly tells us about the development of the 
human mind is that man once believed in theo- 
logical or metaphysical fictions, and that he 
has now ceased, or is gradually ceasing, to believe 
in them. In his later writings, however, Comte 
has come to see that both theology and meta- 
physics are based upon perennial wants of man's 
spiritual nature, wants which, as man, he cannot 
but feel, and for w T hich a real and not merely a 
fictitious satisfaction can be provided. He teaches 
us, therefore, to regard the progress of man as 
a true development, in which the passing away 
of the first forms of his higher life is incidental 



xii Preface. 

to the further manifestation of the spirit, which 
was once expressed in them. Hence the last or 
" positive " stage of thought is conceived to be a 
negation and abolition of the past in which all 
that gave the past its value is reaffirmed and 
maintained. It is a higher "positive," which is 
reached through the negation of the lower, but it 
is itself a great deal more than that negation. 

Now, the ultimate interest of Comte's philo- 
sophy lies in the success or failure of this 
attempt of his to find a new satisfaction for those 
higher wants of humanity, which Theology and 
Metaphysic, or, as I should prefer to say, Eeligion 
and Philosophy, have so long been supposed to 
satisfy. It is not difficult to describe, at least 
in general terms, what these wants are. Philo- 
sophy professes to seek and to find the principle 
of unity which underlies all the manifold particu- 
lar truths of the separate sciences, and in refer- 
ence to which they can be brought together and 
organized as a system of knowledge. And Eeli- 
gion, while it also is concerned with an absolute 
principle of reality, differs from Philosophy mainly 
in this, that it is not merely or primarily theo- 
retical. For Eeligion what is required is such 



Preface. xiii 

a conviction as to the ultimate basis of our 
existence as shall enable us to find therein at 
once an adequate object of affection and a 
sufficient aim for all our practical endeavours. 
Now a scientific Agnosticism, such as is common 
at the present day, means either that there are 
no such wants in man, or that, if they exist, no 
provision is made for their satisfaction. Such an 
Agnosticism could scarcely find a better expres- 
sion for itself than the Comtean law of intellec- 
tual development ; for, as that law is commonly 
understood, it implies that the whole progress of 
man has been just his gradual awakening to 
the necessity of renouncing all effort to pene- 
trate to the reality which is hidden behind the 
veil of phenomena. On this view, it is vain for 
man to ask any longer the question of Philo- 
sophy, or to attempt to find a support for his life 
in the faiths and hopes of religion. Man is but 
a link or a series of links in the endless chain 
of phenomenal causes ; his utmost knowledge 
cannot reach beyond the relations of particular 
things to each other and to his own particular 
existence, and whatever he may desire, to these 
relations he must be content practically to limit 



xiv Preface. 

himself. Tecum hdbita et noris quam sit tibi 
curta swpellex. 

Now the peculiarity of Comte's position is that 
he admits the principle on which this Agnostic 
view is based, and yet at the same time 
rejects the conclusions which are usually and 
naturally drawn from it. He accepts the situa- 
tion as he understands it. He admits and 
contends that Philosophy is defeated in its attempt 
to reach an absolute principle — a principle of 
unity, which is at once the real or objective 
centre of the universe, and the subjective centre 
for our knowledge of it. He admits and con- 
tends that there is a great gulf fixed between 
the absolute reality of things and our conscious- 
ness of them. ' Nevertheless, he holds that, in a 
sense, we may still aspire to that encyclopaedic 
or universal view of things which Philosophy 
pretended to give ; for, though we cannot reach 
an objective principle of unity in things, we can 
still gather knowledge to a subjective centre, by 
regarding all things in relation to our own needs 
and uses. This, however, does not mean that we 
are to view everything in relation to our own 
individual pleasures and pains. For the indi- 



Preface. xv 

vidual is essentially related to his race, or rather, 
as we should say, that the " individual man is a 
mere abstraction, and that there is nothing real 
but Humanity." Hence, in knowledge and in 
feeling we are carried beyond ourselves ; and as 
in our moral life we can rise from egoism to 
altruism, so in our intellectual life we can learn 
to regard the world from the point of view, 
not of the individual, but of the race. And the 
same change brings with it the restoration of 
religion. The " objective " or absolute God, the 
God who made all things work together for good 
to His creatures, has disappeared with the fictions 
of childhood. But His place has been taken 
by Humanity, conceived as a great providential 
existence, which sustains and controls the life of 
the individual man, and in which he finds a 
sufficient object for all his devotion. Looking to 
this Great Being, man need not feel the want of 
any other God. He has before his eyes One 
who can help him and whom he can love and 
serve. Or if he should still feel something 
wanting, as an object of worship, in a Being 
who is not the Absolute Being, he is at liberty 
to indulge in the poetic illusion which makes 



xvi Preface. 

Nature, as well as Humanity, the friend of man. 
If he does so, however, he must remember that 
he is yielding to an illusion, which is not sup- 
ported by anything we know of Nature ; for 
Nature, apart from the action of man upon it, 
shows itself as a mere fatality, which is altogether 
indifferent to his weal or woe. 

Even this short sketch of Comte's system — for 
the detailed exposition of which the reader is re- 
ferred to the following chapters — may suffice to 
show where the vital spot, the Achilles' heel, of 
Comte's philosophy lies. It lies in the idea of a 
" subjective synthesis " or relative centre of know- 
ledge. This idea for Comtists is the articulus 
stantis vel cadentis philosophiae. If this central 
principle can be securely defended, it matters 
little to the orthodox Positivist how many of 
the subordinate elements of Comte's thought may 
have to be abandoned or modified. If it has to 
be surrendered, however numerous and valuable 
may be the separate truths and suggestions which 
are discoverable in every part of Comte's works, 
his philosophy as a whole must be given up. 
From what I have read of the works of Comte's 
most zealous and discerning followers, I am dis- 



Preface. xvii 

posed to think that they would be ready to 
accept this issue. Now Comte's position has 
generally been attacked, if one might so express 
it, from the rear, i.e., by those whose views 
accord most with his earlier doctrine expressed 
in the Philosophic Positive, and who regard him 
as abandoning the true Positivism when he 
admits any philosophical or religious synthesis 
whatever, whether subjective or objective, whether 
relative or absolute. It is in this way that 
Comte was assailed by Littre, the most eminent 
of his French disciples, and it is in this way also 
that he was criticised by Mill and Lewes, who, 
without being strictly his disciples, accepted most 
of the leading ideas of his earlier work. If there 
is any novelty in the criticism contained in 
the following pages, it is that it starts from the 
opposite point of view, and seeks to show that the 
true synthesis of philosophy must be objective as 
well as subjective, and that there can be no re- 
ligion of Humanity which is not also a religion of 
God. And this means that it is logically impos- 
sible to go beyond the merely individualistic point 
of view with which Comte started, except on the 
assumption that the intelligence of man is, or 



xviii Preface. 

involves, a universal principle of knowledge. The 
same arguments, in fact, which break down the 
division between man and man, break down also 
the division between man and nature ; for, if 
all Humanity be considered as organically united, 
it becomes impossible not to recognize in nature 
an essential relation to man, which makes it in 
some sense a part of the same organism. The 
history of the development of Comte's thought 
is itself, as I endeavour in the sequel to show, 
an evidence of this principle : for it is the history 
of a development which ends by all but retracting 
the negations with which it begins. And when, 
in his Synthase Subjective, Comte sanctions the 
poetic treatment of Space and the Earth as divine 
friends of man, and members of a kind of Trinity 
in which Humanity is the third person, he comes 
very near to a complete return upon himself. 
It has, indeed, been contended by Dr. Bridges # 
that this is but the ordinary license of poetry, 
such, for instance, as we find in Shelley's Earth- 
hymn in the " Prometheus Unbound." " Sup- 
posing any one had taken Shelley seriously to 
task for maintaining; that the Earth is alive, should 
* Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine, p. 60. 



Preface. xix 

we not think him curiously dull and pedantic ? " 
True, it may be answered : but, supposing any 
one had maintained that the earth is not in any 
sense the expression of that spiritual principle 
which expresses itself in a higher way in living 
beings, and above all in man, and that, therefore, 
there is nothing but fiction in the ascription of 
life to it, should we not be entitled to say that 
he had lost hold of the sense in which poetry is 
truth ? Should we not consider that he had 
degraded poetry from a sensuous and therefore 
partly fictitious presentment of ideal truth, into a 
mere plaything of fancy which bodies forth things 
that are not as if they were ? In Comte's case 
the interest of the poetic fiction consists in this, 
that it was the imaginative anticipation of a truth 
towards which he was moving, but which he 
had not distinctly recognized. His imagination 
had already emancipated him from the limits 
of those earlier opinions of his, which still held 
good for his understanding. If he had taken 
one step farther, the wheel would have " come 
full circle," and he would have restored both 
Theology and Philosophy to the place from 
which he expelled them. He would have 



xx Preface. 

" burnt what he had adored, and adored what 
he had burnt." 

I cannot say so much in criticism of Comte's 
views without adding — what every new reading 
of his works, and especially of the Politique 
Positive makes me feel more strongly — that the 
value of his teaching is by no means to be 
estimated by its mere logical result. Whatever 
may be said of his philosophy as a whole, he 
possessed that unmistakeable instinct for truth 
which renders even the errors and inconsistencies 
of men of genius more instructive than the most 
unexceptionable reasonings of many judicious 
persons, who follow the beaten tracks of thought 
and, therefore, " need no repentance." 



Erratum.— Page 56, Contents, 6th line, for Religion read Realism. 



THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION 
OF COMTE. 



CHAPTER I. 

GENERAL ACCOUNT OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 

Comte's fundamental principles — Their bearing on his view of 
history — Decay of theology and of the social system founded 
on it — M eta-physic, its strength, for destruction and weakness 
for construction — It prepares the way for positive science, on 
which the social system of the future must be based — Necessity 
for a new religion based on science — Humanity the true object 
of worship — The social system corresponding to the religion of 
Humanity — Man's intellectual and moral powers evolved in 
conflict with nature — The nature of the social organization 
and the three forms of society, the Family, the State, and the 
Church— The Priesthood of Humanity and its office. 

It is impossible to understand the errors of a 
great writer unless we do justice to the truth 
which underlies them. In judging of Comte's 
philosophy, and especially of his social philosophy, 
this law of criticism has often been neglected, 
even by those who, from their general philosophi- 
cal point of view, might seem best qualified to 



__ 



2 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

appreciate him. Disagreeing as I do with many 
of his conclusions, I cannot hope to be entirely 
successful in doing him justice. But the attempt 
to do so may have its use, if only in bringing to 
light the relationship of philosophies which are 
commonly regarded as having no connection with 
each other. The spirit of the time is greater than 
any of its expressions, and it moulds them all, 
under whatever outward diversity of form, to a 
common result. If there is anything which the 
history of philosophy teaches with clearness, it is 
that contemporaneous movements of the human 
spirit, even those which appear to be most inde- 
pendent or antagonistic, are but partial expressions 
of a truth which is not fully revealed in any one 
of them, and which can be adequately appreciated 
only by a later generation. The present is said 
to be par excellence the age of historical criticism ; 
but the historical imagination is worth little if it 
does not enable us to discover identity of nature 
under the most varied disguises, and, instead of 
being confined to the formula? of any one philo- 
sophy, to remould and renew our own ideas by 
entering into the minds of others. In order to 
prepare the way for a just appreciation of the 



Relation to Rousseau. 3 

teaching of Comte, I shall, in this chapter, give 
a short sketch of his philosophy (and more 
particularly of his social philosophy) as far as 
possible from his own point of view, reserving 
for subsequent chapters what I have to say 
in the way of criticism. 

There are two main thoughts which rule the The two 

loading 

mind of Comte, and are the sources of most of 1 q^^ 
the peculiarities of his system. The one is, " the 
law of the three stages " ; the other is the sub- 
ordination of science to man's social well-being, 
or, as he expresses it, of the intellect to the 
heart. The first of these thoughts embodies his 
criterion of knowledge ; the second is the prin- 
ciple by which he seeks to systematize knowledge, 
and to estimate the relative value of its parts. 
The relation of these two points in the mind 
of Comte will be best understood if we recall his 
historical position and the early course of his 
mental development. As with most educated 
Frenchmen of his time, Comte's first thoughts on 
social politics were suggested by the Revolution ; 
and his youthful connection with St. Simon 
showed that he shared in that reaction against 
the individualistic philosophy of the Eighteenth 



4 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

Century, which gave rise to so many socialistic 
and communistic theories. In the school of St. 
Simon, Comte learned the falsehood of the gospel 
f of Eousseau — that last quintessence of the philo- 
; sophy which found reality only in the individual, 
and which, therefore, idealized the natural man 
as he is apart from, and prior to, all society, and 
regarded all social influence as deteriorating from 
his original purity. The hollowness of that 
theory had been written in letters of blood on 
the page of recent history, and that too plainly 
to be ignored by the most hopeful theorist on 
social subjects. Nor could any one who had 
read it there, fail to perceive also the less striking 
failure of the same doctrines in their economical 
form. The liberation of the individual had not 
brought to man political salvation, but had rather 
revealed his essential weakness when emancipated 
from the restraints of social order. " Laissez 
faire " had not, as was expected, introduced an 
economic millennium ; but had rather given rise 
to a struggle of interests, which, if not moderated 
by any higher principle, might end in the dis- 
solution of society. Hence the mere irrational 
movement of reaction drove the mass of men to 



Relation to the Socialists. 5 

bind again upon themselves the fetters which 
the Revolution had broken, and taught those 
who, like De Maistre, represented the ideas and 
interests of the past, the speculative strength 
of their position. De Maistre saw clearly that 
mere individualism is anarchy, and that the 
moral education of man is possible only through 
some binding social force. Nor was it difficult 
for a skilful special pleader like him to confound 
this truth with the doctrine that the only safety 
for civilization lay in a renewed submission to 
the mediaeval order of Church and State. On 
the other hand, men who were too much imbued 
with the modern spirit to be moved by this 
reactionary logic, were led to detach the social- 
istic idea from the special form it had taken 
in past history, and to seek for some new form 
of political organization, in which individual 
freedom should be again subordinated to social 
order. Such men were St. Simon and Fourier— 
not, in any sense, great or comprehensive thinkers, 
but writers who were effective and influential 
for the moment simply because they represented 
the abstraction which was then rising into favour, 
and which had at least this to recommend it, 



I 



The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

that it was the opposite abstraction to that of 
the Revolutionists. Comte was too robust and 
manysided to remain long under the influence 
either of the concrete or of the abstract reac- 
tionaries — either of those who sought to return 
to the form, or of those who sought to return 
to the spirit, of the past. But his temporary 
subjection to St. Simon, and his ultimate revolt 
against him, help us in some measure to under- 
stand that double movement of thought out of 
which his system sprung. His subjection in- 
dicated that he had seen the insufficiency and 
unreality, the abstract and unhistorical character, 
of the gospel of mere rebellion. His emancipa- 
tion from St. Simon indicated his discovery that 
the simple repression of rebellion, the mere 
closing up of the ranks of society under a social 
despotism, was an utterly inadequate solution of 
the difficulty. The problem before him, therefore, 
was to do justice to the element of truth in each 
of these movements — to the social impulse on 
the one hand and to the critical movement of 
intelligence on the other, — and to reconcile them 
in a higher unity. Socialism had taught him 
that social enthusiasm might be separated from 



The Need for a Theology. 7 

the religious and political institutions on which 
it had rested in the past ; and the progress of 
science seemed to teach him that intelligence 
has a constructive as well as a critical influence. 
The solution, therefore, was simply to take the 
former, as determining the end and goal of all 
practical effort ; and the latter, as teaching us 
the proper means for its attainment. The en- 
thusiasm of humanity guided by science, science 
directed so as to secure the highest happiness 
of humanity, were thus the two ideas by which 
the course of his thoughts was determined. 

In the first place these ideas gave to Comte JJyJ^Jf 
what seemed to him a perfect key to the history history 
of the past. Man he conceives of as a being 
who at first is divided between weak social 
tendencies which bind him to his fellows, and 
strong selfish, or, as he calls them, personal 
instincts, which make him their rival and their 
enemy ; yet without the triumph of the former 
over the latter there can be no security for his 
welfare or even for his existence. This triumph 
of social sympathy is the first necessity of civil- 
ization ; and in an early age any theory of life 
must be welcome which promises to secure it. 



—Mi 



8 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

The first social leaders of mankind, even if such 
an idea could have presented itself to them, 
could not wait with patience till experience had 
revealed to them the true nature of man and the 
world he lives in. Their ignorance and their 
benevolent haste to organize society, and to bind 
men together in the bonds of a definite faith, 
made them eagerly grasp at the first explanation 
of the universe which imagination suggested ; 
and that first explanation was of course anthro- 
pomorphic. "As they watched nature, as their 
eyes wandered over the surface of the profound 
ocean, instead of the bed hidden under the 
waters, they saw nothing but the reflection of 
their own faces.""" Hence the first moral order 
and social discipline established among men was 
based upon a theological explanation of the 
universe. Nor did the insecurity of the founda- 
tion seem for a long time to interfere with the 
firmness of the superstructure. The union of 
men was like the union of an army — a union 
of men bound together for life and death, though 
the bond that united them was but a fairy tale. 
Yet, in the long run, it was impossible that 
* Turcot. 



Development of Theology. J> 

criticism should not make itself heard. Ad- 
vancing experience, as it disclosed that the world 
is no plaything of arbitrary wills but an order 
of fixed law, gradually limited the free play of 
imagination, and removed the gods to a greater 
and greater distance. AVhen, therefore, pheno- 
mena were seen to group themselves in large 
genera, with permanent attributes and relations, 
Polytheism rose out of Fetichism ; and when the 
idea of the unity of the world, and of the general 
persistency of its laws, began to prevail, theology 
was inevitably reduced to the conception of one 
overruling will which, directly or by its ministers, 
controls the whole movement of things. Up to 
this point the theological form of thought per- 
sisted : in one point of view it might even lie 
said that, up to this point, it was strengthening- 
its hold upon men. For, every successive con- 
centration of the divine power made the idea 
of it a firmer and more comprehensive bond of 
social order, until at length the levelling and 
organizing genius of Eome laid the foundation of 
the universal empire, and Christian Monotheism 
broke down the walls of division between races 
and nations. 



10 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

The But this, apparent advance of the theological 

decay of r± ° 

theology, gp^it was illusive, for it was really due to an 
intellectual movement, which must, in the long- 
run, prove fatal to that spirit. The concentration 
of Fetichism into Polytheism, and of Polytheism 
into Monotheism, was really the gradual with- 
drawal of theology from the explanation of the 
universe, till, finally, it was driven to its last 
stronghold, its most general and abstract form. 
Hence the hour of its greatest social triumph 
was that which preceded its decisive fall. The 
same growing perception of the order of the 
world under general laws, which had forced the 
theologian first to substitute a limited for an 
indefinite number of divine wills, and then to 
substitute one will for this limited number, 
necessarily and inevitably awakened a doubt 
whether there is in nature any indication of 
will at all. Monotheism had represented the 
world as a general order of fixed laws, only 
interrupted by exceptional miracles ; but in- 
creasing knowledge made miracles more and more 
incredible, till at last the theologians were re- 
duced to the assertion that their God had once 
performed them, but that he performed them 



Victory of Metaphysic. 11 

no longer. When this point was reached, it 
was not difficult to see that the whole anthro- 
pomorphic explanation of things was on the eve 
(if disappearing. A God, who was nearer man 
in the past than he is in the present, could not 
he the God of the future. 

But even before this period, the growing weak- And of the 

A social order 

ness of the theoretical basis of belief had begun withit** 
to affect the practical life of men. The social 
order was built upon theology, and therefore 
the advance of the critical spirit w r as continually 
loosening its foundations. Hence the fierce 
hostility of the representatives of that order to 
the freedom of the intelligence. That hostility, 
however, is to be attributed not so much to their 
indignation at unbelief in itself, as to their alarm 
at the dissolution of social order which was its 
practical result. Nor was it altogether inexcus- 
able, so long as the assailants of the old faith 
were unable to propound any theoretical prin- 
ciples which could be made the basis of recon- 
struction. Now the metaphysical principles to 
which these assailants appealed were really 
negations pretending to be affirmations, the purely 
negative character of which must reveal itself 



12 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

as soon as their victory was achieved. Men in 
whom the practical and organizing impulse was 
strong, who felt the necessity for a moral order, 
could not but see that such ropes of sand were 
no real substitute for the old framework of social 
and political life, and they were therefore tempted 
to shut their eyes to the intellectual claims of a 
truth which could be fertile only in destruction. 
Thus arose that fatal division between the heart 
and the intellect which has lasted down to the 
present day, and which must last till the intellect 
shows itself capable of producing a system which 
can more securely sustain the social order, 
and more completely satisfy the affections and 
spiritual aspirations of men, than the fictions of 
theology. 
The The truth of this view will be more clearly 

metaphysi- 

^thought, seen if we examine the nature of that intermediate 
system of critical thought which was the great 
weapon of attack upon theology. This system 
was, in fact, only the last abstraction of the 
theological anthropomorphism itself. As in 6ne 
department of human thought after another the 
knowledge of the uniform and unchangeable order 
of things prevailed over the conception of accident 



Weakness of Metaphysic. 13 

and arbitrary change, the idea of will became 
attenuated, until it ultimately disappeared alto- 
gether from the explanation of nature. But it 
left behind a kind of spectre of abstraction. 
Instead of being dominated by gods, phenomena 
were supposed to be dominated by essences and 
powers, which, however, were merely abstract 
repetitions of those phenomena. How abstrac- 
tions came to be thus substantiated as real 
entities, separate from the phenomena in which 
they were manifested, might be difficult to under- 
stand, if we did not remember that they were but 
the residua of what had once been individualized 
pictures of imagination. The essences of the 
Schoolmen were but the dry bones of the living- 
creatures of poetry which the understanding had 
slain. " The human mind," as Mill puts it, " did 
not set out from the notion of a name, but from 
that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions 
was not the embodiment of a word, but the dis- 
embodiment of a Fetich." Really, therefore, these 
essences and powers were nothing more than the 
pure abstractions, and therefore only the negations, 
of the gods whose places they took. They had 
no positive content of their own. As mere 



1 4 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

negatives they had no value except in relation 
to the corresponding affirmatives, although in the 
first instance imagination was strong enough to 
give them the semblance of positive principles 
occupying the place of the beliefs they expelled. 
And it was just this temporary illusion which 
made them such powerful weapons of destruction. 
For the revolutionary passion can never be sus- 
tained by negations which it recognizes as such. 
It is impossible to march with enthusiasm to the 
attack upon the institutions of the past, without 
the conviction that there is something more to be 
gained than the destruction of those institutions. 
Develop- The metaphysical philosophy, as the necessary 
physic, forerunner of the philosophy of experience, gradu- 
ally extended its destructive power over all 
branches of human knowledge. At first " it laid 
its hand on the sciences that deal with inorganic 
nature, and of these, first of all on those that 
deal with the phenomena furthest from man, and 
least subject to his control. For man discovers 
that the phenomena of the heavens are not ruled 
by arbitrary will, long before he discerns the 
absence of caprice from the general course of 
nature. In like manner, he is sensible that 



The Idea of Nature. 15 

inorganic tilings have fixed and unchangeable 
relations, while as yet the spontaneity of animal 
life seems to he as unlimited as that which he 
attributes to his own will. And only last of all 
does it dawn upon him that his own life also is 
limited and controlled by something, which is 
neither his own will nor the will of a being like 
himself whom he can propitiate or persuade — 
something which is both within and without him, 
to which he must conform himself, seeing it 
will not conform to him. The last substantiated 
abstraction, therefore, which is put in the place 
of the divine powers, is Nature. And Nature is 
only a name for the general course of things, 
though it is regarded by metaphysics as existing 
apart from and controlling them. But as Nature 
succeeds to the place of a Clod whom men were 
conceived to be bound to obey, but able arbitrarily 
to disobey, so it is represented as the source of a 
law distinct from the actual course of human life, 
and to which it does not necessarily conform. 
The law of nature, in this view, is a law written 
on man's heart, but not necessarily realized in his 
actions. In truth, however, it is but the negation 
of that order of social life which was based upon 



1G The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the theological idea, though its negative character 

is necessarily hidden from those who believe in it. 

its power This becomes evident whenever we examine 

for de- 
struction, the main articles contained in this supposed law 

of nature. For these are simply negations of 
different parts of that social order which was 
based upon theology. The first of these articles 
is the right of private judgment — that is, the 
right of every individual to emancipate himself 
from all spiritual authority, and to judge of 
everything for himself. This principle is merely 
" a sanction of the state of anarchy, which inter- 
vened between the decay of the old discipline and 
the formation of new spiritual ties." In other 
words, it is not a new principle of order, but the 
abstract expression of the ungoverned state of 
mere individual opinion, " for no association what- 
ever, even of the smallest number of persons and 
for the most temporary objects, can subsist without 
some degree of intellectual and moral agreement 
between its members." In the next place, among 
the articles of the law of nature, stands the 
doctrine of equality, which has a meaning only 
as the negation of the old hierarchy, the old social 
and political order, but which, taken absolutely, 



The Formulas of Anarchy. 17 

is the negation of all order whatever. For if 
society is anything more than a collection of 
unrelated atoms, if it is an organic unity, it must 
have different organs for its different functions; 
and it is as impossible that these organs should 
all be equal, as that they should all be the same. 
This doctrine, therefore, is but the abstract procla- 
mation of social anarchy. To these articles are 
commonly added the doctrines of national indepen- 
dence, and of the sovereignty of the people. The 
former is nothing more than the negation of that 
spiritual supremacy of the Church, which in the 
Middle Ages mediated between the nations of 
Europe and made them one community ; but, taken 
absolutely, it would imply national isolation and 
international anarchy. The latter is the transfer- 
ence to the governed of that fiction of divine 
right which was formerly supposed to reside in 
the governor, and it has no meaning except as 
the negation of that fiction. For the people can- 
not rule themselves ; and even to make them 
choose their ruler, that is, to make the inferior 
and less wise choose the superior and wiser, can- 
not be regarded as more than a provisional ex- 
pedient for anarchic times. 



18 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

its weak- The articles of the law of nature, then, like all 

ness for 

tfon Struc ' metaphysical principles, are merely principles of 
insurrection and revolt. They have no positive 
validity ; for they are just the ultimate abstrac- 
tions, or, so to speak, the speculative phantoms of 
the system which they destroy. As it is said that 
a man dies when he has seen his own ghost, so, 
according to Comte, the destroyer of theology is 
just the ghost of itself, raised by abstraction. But 
the ghost also vanishes when its victim is fairly 
buried, leaving the field to the growing strength 
of positive science. 

it prepares Positive science, then, is the real cause of all 

the way for 

science intellectual progress, its advance constitutes the 
nisus formativus that is concealed beneath the 
surface struggle of theology and metaphysics. For 
even in the earliest theological era, there was a 
certain element of positive science, that is, of 
knowledge of the permanent relations of things. 
The most arbitrary will is not all arbitrary, but 
presupposes something of a fixed order without or 
within, and therefore the anthropomorphic analo- 
gies by which phenomena were interpreted, still 
left some space for the idea of law. And this 
space was continually being widened, at the 



Metaphysie Allied with Science. 1<) 

expense of the arbitrary and the accidental. 
While metaphysics seemed simply to be substi- 
tuting one transcendent explanation for another, 
it was really disguising the abandonment of all 
transcendent explanations whatever, and the 
introduction of positive explanations in their 
place. The doubts expressed in the metaphysical 
criticism were really due to a growing sense of 
law, which, when it became clear and self-con- 
scious, produced the positive philosophy. Hence 
there was, for a long time, an intimate alliance 
between the scientific and the metaphysical spirit, 
though the former was merely " critical" and the 
latter " organic" And this alliance was the more 
easily maintained, because, in the first instance, 
neither the negative character of the former nor 
the positive character of the latter was distinctly 
discerned. Metaphysic was not seen to be merely 
" critical," because its abstractions were taken to 
be real entities. And science could not be seen 
to be " organic," that is, to contain the principle 
of a new organization of society, till it rose from 
the contemplation of the inorganic world to the 
study of life, and especially of human life. His- 
tory, however, shows that science has always 



20 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

reaped the fruits of every victory won over 
theology by metaphysic, and on the other hand 
that metaphysic has never succeeded in maintain- 
ing any position against theology, which has not 
soon been occupied by science. The great 
metaphysical movement of the Greeks left for its 
sole permanent result the sciences of Geometry 
and Astronomy ; while their premature specula- 
tions on Psychology and Sociology were suppressed 
or forgotten by the mediaeval church, which 
directed all the intelligence of the world to the 
practical work of civilizing and organizing men 
by means of the monotheistic idea. When thought 
was again awakened, the abstract metaphysic of 
the Schoolmen was only the forerunner of the 
renewed study of natural science, especially of 
Physics and Chemistry, which at first appeared 
under the forms of Astrology and Alchemy ; and 
the victory of Nominalism over Eealism, in which 
the scholastic philosophy ended, was the indica- 
tion of another triumph of the scientific spirit. 
For Nominalism is simply the negation of 
that tendency to personify abstractions, which 
is the essence of metaphysic. Finally, as a con- 
sequence of that development of science which 



Science at War with Metapkysic. 2L 

culminated in Newton, metaphysic ceased to 
apply its method to the external world, and 
confined itself to the sphere of Biology and 
Sociology, from which it is now being gradually 
driven. In the last of these applications, its 
power for criticism and destruction, and its weak- 
ness for reconstruction and reorganization, were 
proved by the decisive experiment of the French 
Revolution, in which the ideas of the rights of 
man and the law of nature were tried and found 
wanting. Since that time political life has fluc- 
tuated between the theological and the meta- 
physical principles, and therefore between the 
opposite dangers of reaction and revolution, find- 
ing no security for order but in the former, and 
no security for progress but in the latter. But 
the advance of Sociology into the positive stage, 
which has been inaugurated by Comte, has, in 
his view, shown that the opposite interests of 
order and progress may be equally secured, if 
only we base both upon a knowledge of the 
laws by which the existence and activity of 
man are ruled, and not on the fictions of the 
imagination, or on the still emptier fictions of 
the understanding. 



99 



The Social Philosophy of Comte. 



on science The aim of the future, then, is one with the 

the social 

thffuture a i m °f ^h.e past. That social passion which in all 

must be . . 

based great constructive periods 01 human history, and 

especially in the Middle Ages, took hold of theo- 
logical beliefs and made them a means to organize 
and discipline mankind, is still to be the guiding 
motive of all speculation and action. But the 
system of thought which it uses for this end must 
inevitably be changed. Eenouncing the theological 
and metaphysical interpretations of things, which 
have been proved to be either inconsistent with 
facts or at least incapable of being verified by 
facts, we must now base our effort to improve 
man's estate upon the laws of the resemblance, 
the coexistence, and the succession of phenomena 
as these are determined by science. And on the 
other hand, as we recognize that all the sciences 
tend to lose themselves in the multiplicity of a 
universe, where every path leads to the infinite, 
we must seek also to organize and discipline the 
hitherto dispersive efforts of science, so that they 
may be directed entirely to the relief and further- 
ance of man's estate. In this way scientific 
knowledge and social benevolence will act and 
react, at once limiting and supporting each other, 



A Wise Agnosticism. 23 

and amid all the darkness of a universe which 
absolutely is unknowable, and, even relatively 
to himself, is only partially knowable, man can 
yet give a kind of unity and completeness to his 
transitory existence. For all he needs to know 
is that which experience has constantly been 
teaching, the uniformity and constancy of the 
laws of phenomena, By means of this know- 
ledge, so far as he can obtain it, and without any 
need to penetrate into the transcendent causes of 
things, he can foresee many phenomena, like those 
of the heavens, over which he has no control 
whatever, and also many phenomena, like those 
of his own nature and his immediate environ- 
ment, which he can, to a certain degree, change 
and modify. And thus he can learn, with con- 
tinually growing certainty, what are the means 
he must use to bring within his reach the highest 
good which the system of things allows him to 
attain, detaching his thoughts and interests more 
and more from the unfathomed abyss beyond, 
which he now knows to be by him unfathom- 
able. 

Is it, then, possible for men to sketch out the Necessity 

for a new 

programme of an existence limited to this " bank religion 



• 24 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

and shoal of time," to conceive it as a complete 
system in itself, and r6-organiser sans Dietc ni roi, 
par le culte sysUmatique de VhumaniU? Can 
they, surrendering the belief in " a Divinity that 
shapes their ends, rough hew them how they will," 
" constitute a real providence for themselves, in 
all departments, moral, intellectual, and ma- 
terial" ? Comte answers that they can; and 
in the " Politique Positive " he tries to exhibit 
the main outlines of that social system of the 
future by which this end is to be attained. 
Religious His starting point is — strange as at first it 

basis of 

life - may seem — the idea of religion. " Since religion 
embraces all our existence, its history must be an 
epitome of the whole history of our development." 
Beneath and beyond all the details of our ideas 
of things, there is a certain " esprit d'ensemble," 
a general conception of the world without and 
the world within, in which these details gather 
to a head. If this conception or picture be co- 
herent with itself, and if at the same time it be 
such as to present an object on which our -affec- 
tions can rest, and an end in the pursuit of 
which all our powers and capacities may be exer- 
cised, then our life will have that unity and con- 



Religion gives Unity to Life. 25 

sistency with itself which is necessary for the 
highest efficiency and happiness. Such a har- 
mony of existence, in which all its elements are 
fitly co-ordinated, is what, in Comte's view, con- 
stitutes a religion. And, since man is both an 
individual and a social being, this harmony is 
seen to involve two things. It involves a sub- 
ordination of all the elements of man's individual 
nature to some ruling tendency, and it involves a 
certain adaptation of men to, and a combination 
of them with, each other. Further, this harmony 
of humanity with itself must also be a harmony 
of man with the world in which he exists. In 
other words, the individual can attain his highest 
perfection and happiness only in so far as he is, at 
once and by virtue of the same principle, in har- 
mony with the world, with his fellow-men, and 
with himself. 

Now, this harmony cannot be produced by the Elements 

■*■ necessary 

sway of personal or egoistic motives ; for these r°[i^ on . 
are in fatal disagreement with each other, and 
they set each man in antagonism to all other 
men, and even to the natural conditions of his 
own existence. The regulation and harmonizing 
of the nature of the individual man, therefore, 



26 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

implies his attachment or self-surrender to that 
which is without him, and to which he is neces- 
sarily related — to some object in that world of 
persons and things which hems him in on every 
side, and which must needs be his enemy so long 
as he is ruled by egoism. Further, if the prin- 
ciple of religion is thus to be found without and 
not within the individual man, it must be found 
in some object to which he submits as a superior 
power, and on which, at the same time, his affec- 
tions can rest. Submission and love are both 
necessary to religion, for if we have merely the 
former, the utmost we can feel is resignation to a 
fatality ; and this, though it involves a certain 
limitation of the selfish tendencies, can never 
overcome them, or substitute a new motive for 
them. To retain the energy of egoism and com- 
bine it with resignation to a power greater than 
ours, we must love that power to which we sub- 
mit. Finally, this submission and self-surrender 
must be consistent with a certain relative sense 
of independence, for no feeling is really powerful 
which does not result in action. Hence, to sub- 
mission and love, we must add the belief that we 
can make ourselves useful to that Beino- to whom 



Three Elements of Religion. 27 

we submit and whom we love. Only thus, when 
veneration for that which is above us, is com- 
bined with love for that which is the constant 
source of good to us, and with benevolence to- 
wards that which needs our help,"" can we rise 
above the unreal and imperfect unity of selfish- 
ness into the perfect unity of religion. Or, to 
put it more shortly, in Comte's own language, 
" the principal religious difficulty is to secure 
that the external shall regulate the internal with- 
out affecting its spontaneity " ; to secure, that is, 
that the free subjective principles of love and 
benevolence shall attach to the power to which 
we believe our existence to be subordinated. For 
if our faith be not one with our love, or if our 
love be not a principle of activity, we cannot be, 
in the full sense of the word, religious. 

Now the difficulty of attaining such a har- Scientific 

" basis for 

mony or unity of existence cannot but be obvious religion. 
to those who live in a period when " the intelli- 
gence is in insurrection against the heart ; " when 
what men desire and love is not by any means 
one with what, on the authority of science, they 
believe. If, however, we follow the course of 
* Cf. Goethe's " Three Reverences." 



28 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

advancing knowledge, we shall see that this state 
of things is merely temporary, and that completed 
positive science gives us back all that in the 
course of its development it seemed to take away. 
Science, indeed, from its very dawn, when it dis- 
covers that there is a fixed order and law in the 
movement of the heavenly bodies, gives support 
to one element of religion, the sense that we are 
in the hands of a superior power. It reveals to 
man an ultimate necessity which bounds and de- 
termines his life — a necessity which, from the 
nature of the case, he cannot modify. And as 
the idea of law is gradually extended to physical, 
chemical, and vital phenomena, this necessity is 
seen to limit and control him on every side. 
Phenomena, therefore, can no longer be regarded 
as the expressions of the wills of fictitious beings 
endowed with the qualities most admired in 
humanity, and therefore capable of being loved. 
And the natural effect of this is to reduce religion 
into a mere resignation to an irresistible fate, 
which is incapable of awaking or responding to 
human affection. With the rise of sociology, 
however, science changes its aspect, and begins to 
restore to us more than all that was contained in 



Sociology and Religion. 20 

the dreams of mythology which it has destroyed. 
For this culminating' science teaches us to regard 
the whole race of man as an organic and self- 
developing unity, in which we, as individuals, arc 
parts or members. Between our own life and 
the merely external necessity of nature we see a 
spiritual power which modifies it and adapts it 
to our wants. Between the individual and the 
world stands humanity, and the " main pressure 
of external fatality does not fall upon the former 
directly, but only through the interposition of the 
latter." In passing through this medium, brute 
necessity is changed more and more into a saving 
providence. To be convinced of this we need 
only to observe that, after we go beyond the 
fixed order of the celestial system, which is the 
ultimate necessity of our lives, and which lies 
entirely beyond the reach of our interference, we 
come upon various orders of phenomena — phys- 
ical, chemical, and vital — which are capable of 
modification, and are continuously subjected to it 
by man, and even by plants and animals. So 
soon as life begins, order becomes the basis of 
progress : for the living being not only adapts 
itself to the medium in which it lives, but con- 



30 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

tinually reacts upon that medium, in order to 
render it more suitable for its wants ; (and in the 
case of man, inasmuch as his existence has a con- 
nection and a continuity that binds the whole race 
together through the long succession of as;es, this 
reaction is cumulative. The life of the indi- 
vidual in any age is what it is, by reason of the 
whole progressive movement of humanity ; and 
the later the time of his appearance the more he 
owes to his race. " The living are always more 
and more dominated by the dead." On this 
great benefactor, therefore, his thoughts can rest, 
as a power which moderates and controls his 
whole life, and which controls it not merely as a 
fate to which he must resign himself, but as a 
providence to which his love and gratitude are 
due. Nor will such feelings be less powerful 
because this Providence is one which he can 
serve, and which needs his service. Hence he is 
led to contemplate his life in all that makes it 
worth living, as the gift of a " Grand Etre," to 
whom during his short term of earthly years it is 
his highest virtue to devote himself, and with 
whom it is his final reward to become incor- 
porated. For his " objective " or actual existence 



Religion of Humanity. 31 

in time has no valuable result, unless it add 
to the "subjective" existence of humanity, the 
influences and memories which mould for good 
the lot of subsequent generations. His religion, 
in short, is to consider himself as a useful link 
in the chain between the past and future of 
the race, a soldier of humanity in the continual 
struggle whereby it adapts itself to its sphere 
of action, and its sphere of action to itself, so 
as to realize an ever richer and more harmoni- 
ous social existence. 

It is true indeed that Humanity has no abso- Humanity 

the only 

lute power, that it is hemmed in by a fatality true God - 
which it can only partially modify. " This im- 
mense and eternal Being has not created the 
materials which its wise activity employs, nor 
the laws which determine the results of its 
action." But it is as vain to attempt to raise 
our hearts beyond this immediate benefactor, as 
to carry the mind beyond the circle of experience 
within which it is necessarily enclosed. Nay, it 
is not only vain, but hurtful. " The provisional 
regime which ends in our day has only too clearly 
manifested the gravity of this danger, for during 
it the greater part of the thanks addressed to the 



32 The Social 'Philosophy of Comte. 

fictitious Being constituted so many acts of in- 
gratitude to Humanity, the sole author of the 
benefits for which thanks were given." " If the 
adoration of fictitious powers was morally indis- 
pensable, so long as the true ' Grand Etre ' that 
rules our lives could not clearly manifest himself, 
now at least it would tend to turn us away from 
the sole worship that can improve us. Those 
who would prolong it at the present day are for- 
getting its legitimate purpose, which was simply 
to direct provisionally the evolution of our best 
feelings, under the regency of Goal during the long 
minority of Humanity." Of this worship, the 
Christian doctrine of the incarnation might be 
regarded as an anticipation, and still more per- 
haps the mediseval worship of the Virgin^ for 
women, as the sex characterized by sympathy, 
are the fit representatives of Humanity. They 
mediate between Humanity and man, as Hu- 
manity mediates between man and the worlcL- 
The social But the worship of Humanity is only the 

system 

based on general principle from which the new life of 

religion. (l g oc i ocraC y " mus t spring, it is not " Sociocracy " 

itself. We have therefore to inquire what is the 

order of life that corresponds to this new religion. 



with 
iture. 



Man and Nature. S3 

I Lav does it modify our ideas of the relation of 
men to each other and to the world? And what 
light does it cast upon the various forms of social 
existence, upon the Family, the State, and the 
Church ? I can only give a brief resume of 
Gomte's answers to these questions. 

All e£vftiss#i©» or improvement depends ulti- Man in 

conflict 

mately on man's control over material resources, w 
over the powers and products of nature. And, 
on the other hand, it is the reactive influence 
upon himself of the effort by which he appro- 
priates and adapts these resources to his purposes, 
which first civilizes and educates him. Man can 
only conquer nature by obeying her laws, and 
to obey these laws he must know them. Hence 
it is the necessities of the practical life which 
excite the first efforts after scientific knowledge, 
and it is under the pressure of the same necessi- 
ties that man first learns to surrender self-will to 
the discipline of regular labour, and of co-opera- 
tion with his fellows. "We might indeed imagine 
a different kind of education for the human race. 
If mankind generally, like some of the richer 
classes, were placed in circumstances in which, 
without effort or struggle, they could at once 



w 



34 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

satisfy all their natural wants and desires, we 
might imagine that social sympathies and intel- 
lectual tastes would soon prevail over all the 
personal or egoistic tendencies. For though the 
latter were at first far the strongest, they would 
gradually die out for lack of occasions for exer- 
cise. Losing thus the powerful stimulus of self- 
interest, which drives us to investigate the laws 
of nature, the intellectual activity of such beings 
would take an aesthetic direction, and would be 
devoted mainly to the task of providing forms 
of expression for the social sympathies. These 
social sympathies would become intense, for they 
would occupy the whole of life. But they would 
in the first instance be confined in the circle of 
the family ; for the social life of States gains 
its principal interest from the ever-widening co- 
operation which is required in the struggle for 
•existence against external difficulties. The nat- 
ural creed of men would be an aesthetic Fetich- 
ism ; and this, in the course of time, when men 
had learned to distinguish between action and 
life, would be changed into Positivism without 
needing to pass through the long intermediate 
stages of theology and metaphysics ; while, in 



A Beneficent Necessity. 35 

the practical life, the affection of the family 
would broaden to the love of humanity, omit- 
ting the middle term of nationality. Finally, 
as the heart and the intelligence would continu- 
ally gain a more marked ascendency over the 
practical activity, it would be natural that the 
spiritual power should rule the temporal, and 
that women should have the supremacy over 
men. 

This ideal, however, only serves to illustrate by uses of 

this con- 
contrast the real course of things, which indeed flict - 

continually advances towards the same goal, but 
by a far longer and more stormy path, a path 
not of untroubled and peaceful growth, but of 
conflict, division, and pain. We shall find, how- 
ever, as a kind of recompense for this hard pro- 
cess of mediation, that the final reconciliation of 
humanity with the world and with itself is far 
more perfect and conclusive, as it is a reconcilia- 
tion which subordinate^, while it satisfies, all the 
different elements of his nature. For a " sociality," 
reared on the basis of a fully developed yet con- 
quered " personality," is a far higher ideal than 
such an imagined paradise, in which the struggle 
for existence, with all the intellectual and physical 



lines his 
moral 

nature 



36 The Social Philosojihy of Comte. 

exertion which it involves, would be made un- 
necessary, 
it awakens Our personal tendencies are strongest at first, 

and discip- 

and in their direct action they might lead, and 
do indeed often lead, to a sacrifice of society to 
the individual, and to the development in him of 
an extravagant pride and self-will, by which both 
heart and reason are corrupted. But man soon 
finds that he must stoop to conquer ; that he 
must submit his action to the laws of nature, if 
he would make nature the servant of his pur- 
poses ; that he must himself be instrumental to 
the well-being of others ere he can make them 
instruments of his own well-being. And in 
this submission of caprice and passion to reason 
and law, and of his own life to social ends, he 
gradually developes his intellectual powers and 
social sympathies till they gain a supremacy over 
those egoistic tendencies to which in the first 
instance they were subordinated. The highest 
ideal of man's life is to systematize this spon- 
taneous process, and to turn into a conscious 
aim that moral and intellectual discipline of his 
nature, which in the past has been the unfore- 
seen result of his effort after personal ends. We 



Necessity makes us Free. 37 

must, however, remember that this result would 
not have been possible unless the beginnings of 
these higher tendencies had existed in man from 
the first. No empirical process could ever have 
developed social sympathies in him, if he had 
been by nature utterly selfish, any more than it 
could have produced reason in a being who was 
devoid of even the germ of intelligence. But 
the whole history of human progress is just 
an account of the process whereby feeble social 
affections, using as a fulcrum the outward neces- 
sities of man's life, gradually secure to themselves 
the direction of all his activity. " The principal 
triumph of humanity consists in drawing its best 
means of perfecting itself from that very fatality 
which seems at first to condemn us to the most 
brutal egoism." For, " so soon as the personal 
instincts have placed us in a situation proper 
to satisfy our social tendencies, these, in virtue 
of their irresistible charm, commonly guide us to 
a course of conduct which they could not have 
had at first the force to dictate." 

These principles find their illustration in cer- Economical 

. , T . . . and social 

tain economical truths. in most conditions m progress. 
which human beings are placed, the individual is 



38 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

capable of producing more than is immediately 
necessary for his wants ; or, in other words, of 
accumulating wealth. Such accumulations make 
social existence possible, and coming, by gift or 
conquest, into the hands of the heads of society, 
become the means of realizing a division of labour, 
and providing the different classes of labourers 
with sustenance and instruments of production- 
Division of labour, again, while it secures 
increased efficiency, makes continually greater 
demands upon science for guidance, and thus 
stimulates the development of the intellectual 
life. Thus the hard external conditions under 
which man has to seek the satisfaction of 
his wants become a beneficent necessity, which 
forces him to increase his knowledge, and to 
co-operate with an ever-widening circle of his 
fellow-men. This co-operation, indeed, is not 
always conscious ; and, even when it is con- 
scious, it is not necessarily accompanied by 
social sympathy, as is shown by the fierce 
industrial struggles of capital with labour at 
the present day. Yet it is inevitable that it 
should in the long run produce a sense of the 
solidarity of mankind. " As each one really 



The Forms of Social Life. 39 

labours for the others, in the end he must ac- 
quire the consciousness that he does so labour," 
and the consciousness of being a part in a greater 
whole must produce a willingness to serve it and 
live for it. Thus, a movement beginning in the 
reactive influence on man's activity of the phy- 
sical conditions of his life, extends its effects 
gradually to his intelligence and his heart, so 
that the order of the elements of his nature 
becomes, as it were, inverted ; the first becomes 
last, and the last first. And, instead of the self- 
concentration of the savage, we have the develop- 
ment of a social impulse, which begins by setting 
the family before the individual, which goes on 
to set the state before the family, and which must 
end in setting humanity before all. 

The way in which this movement is accom- ]^ e n ^ l lf 

society 

plished, and the form of social life in which it ' 
must result, are determined by principles that 
have already been suggested. The abstract ele- 
ments of human life, of which we are to take 
account, are material, intellectual, and moral force, 
corresponding respectively to the will, the intelli- 
gence, and the heart. And these again correspond 
to three forms of association among men — the 



40 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

State, the Church, and the Family ; three partial 
societies, in the union of which alone man can 
attain the complete satisfaction of his complex 
being. It is scarcely necessary to intimate, 
however, that this general correspondence of 
the abstract and concrete divisions is not meant 
to imply that any one of these forms of society 
is purely material, purely intellectual, or purely 
based upon affection. ' The great whole of the 
universal society is made up of parts which are 
like it, and are themselves wholes ; and in every 
one of them we can make a division of material, 
intellectual, and moral powers. Still, with this 
reservation, we may say generally that the bond 
which holds the family together is one of affec- 
tion ; that the bond of the state is one of action, 
or material purpose ; and that the bond of hu- 
manity is the spiritual bond of intelligence. And 
further, that, as in the Family the tone and temper 
of the whole society is determined by the women, 
so the tone and temper of the State is determined 
by the practical classes, warlike or industrial ; and 
the tone and temper of the Church by the priest- 
hood, theological or scientific.,,- It is one main 
design of Comte's sociology to organize and put 



Principles of Social Union. 41 

in their proper relation to each other the three 
great social powers, which have successively es- 
tablished their claims in the long history of 
human development. The dawn of civilization 
saw the organization of the family, under the 
guidance of Fetichism. Polytheism taught men 
to combine in a civil society, under the guidance 
of a power in which temporal and spiritual au- 
thority were confused together. Finally, Mono- 
theism separated the secular and spiritual powers, 
and established a certain provisional equilibrium 
between them. Metaphysic was powerful only 
to destroy ; but by sapping the foundations of 
the theological system it prepared the way for 
Positivism, by which Family, State, and Church 
are finally to be distinguished and harmonized, 
or fixed in their proper organic relations to each 
other, so as to preclude for ever their warfare or 
intrusion upon each other's provinces. 

In determining the nature and relation of these The 

organi- 

three forms of social union, Comte lays down two gg^ 1 
principles. The first is, that there can be no 
society without a government, any more than 
there can be a government, or effective power 
among men, without a society. " A true social 



42 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

force is the result of a more or less extended 
co-operation, gathered up into an individual 
organ." It is a result in which many are con- 
cerned, yet which finds its final expression 
through the will of one. As to the former 
point, that a social basis of force is necessary,. 
Comte says that " there is nothing individual, 
except physical force," and even physical force 
is very limited when it is merely individual. 
Every other kind of power, whether intellectual 
or moral, is essentially social, dependent on the 
co-operation of many minds in the present, and 
generally also on a slow accumulation of energy 
in the past. As Goethe said, " It is not the 
solitary man that can accomplish anything, but 
only he who unites with many at the right time." 
Nor, on the other hand, can we have social force 
without government. The concurrence of many 
can never be really effective, until it finds an in- 
dividual organ to gather it up, and concentrate it 
to a definite result. Sometimes the individual 
comes first, fixes his mind on a determinate pur- 
pose, and then gathers to himself the various 
partial forces which are necessary to achieve it. 
More often in the case of great social movements, 



Natural and Spiritual Rule. 43 

there is a spontaneous convergence of many par- 
ticular tendencies, till, finally, the individual 
appears who gives them a common centre, and 
binds them into one whole. But in all cases 
the effective co-operation, the real social force, is 
not present till it has thus concentrated and 
individualized itself. 

The second principle is one that has been outward 

subordina- 

already illustrated. It is, in Comte's view, the ^° f t0 
law of the world that the higher should imme- 
diately subordinate itself to the lower. Thus 
the organic finds its life controlled and limited 
by the inorganic world, and man has to work 
out his destiny in submission to all the necessi- 
ties, physical, chemical, and vital, which are pre- 
supposed in his existence. The higher, therefore, 
can overcome the lower only by obedience ; if it 
is to conquer, it must at least " stoop to conquer." 
And this law holds equally good in the case of 
the social life of man. As it is the satisfaction 
of material wants that is, and must be, the first 
motive of his life, so it is in the effort to main- 
tain his outward existence, and to employ the re- 
sources of nature for the satisfaction of his desires, 
that his powers are first excited and disciplined. 



<•«■ 



44 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

Hence it is the practical activities — military or 
industrial according to the state of civilization 
— which must bear the immediate rule in his 
life ; not because they are the highest, but be- 
cause they are the indispensable basis of every- 
thing else. Moral and intellectual influences can 
only come in afterwards, in the second place, to 
modify the ruthless energy of the practical life. 
They are essentially restraining, correcting, guid- 
ing, and not in the first instance stimulating or 
originative forces. It is when they act in this 
indirect way that they are really most efficient, 
and their direct action, if it were possible, would 
defeat itself. Their purity cannot be secured 
except by their withdrawal from the sphere of 
action and command ; their power is dependent 
on their self-abnegation and rejection of imme- 
diate authority and rank. They cease to in- 
fluence men when they begin to dominate. 
jSTay, even if their purity were secured, and 
they could reign without rivals, we have seen 
that they would produce a less beneficent result 
than when they come in as moderators. The 
purely " altruistic " and intellectual being, in , 
whom personal motives did not exist, would 



Woman and the Family. 45 

have a less exalted ideal of life set befor< 
him than one in whom the personal motives 
exist in all their energy, but are remoulded in 
conformity with social interests. 

On this basis we have to consider the order The Family, 
of the Family, the State, and the Church. The 
family is the first instrument of man's social 
education. It takes him at the lowest point, to 
raise him to the highest. Its life is the " only 
natural mediation which can habitually disengage 
us from pure personality, to raise us gradually to 
true sociability." In it the man, according to 
the above principle, must bear rule, though it 
be the woman, who, "par I'affectueuse reaction 
du conseil sur le commandcmcnt" ultimately deter- 
mines the spirit of the society. A shadow also 
of the other spiritual power, the power of intelli- 
gence, often appears in the family, especially in 
the early patriarchal societies, in the customary 
authority given to the moderating counsel of 
the elders who are beyond the age for active 
service. 

The State is the peculiar sphere of the active The state. 
or secular power, which, after being military, has 
now become distinctly industrial. During the 



46 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

military stage, the harmony of the different 
classes in the State was less difficult to preserve, 
seeing that common danger bound together the 
soldier classes, and confirmed their fidelity to 
their leaders ; while, in general, the industrial 
offices were committed to slaves or serfs, who 
were deprived of all political power. The change 
to an industrial order of political life brings with 
it many dangers to the unity of the State, especi- 
ally as it has taken place at a time when the 
old theological basis of belief is undermined. 
Hence the already difficult task of organizing 
society, on the basis of individual freedom and 
without the external pressure of danger, is 
rendered still more difficult. The capitalists, 
who are the natural leaders of an industrial 
society, have often been wanting in the con- 
sciousness of their social function, and in their 
conduct towards their workmen, and towards 
each other, have been given up to the action 
of personal motives. On the other hand, the 
labourers, or " proletaires," filled with the new 
sense of independence and excited by revolu- 
tionary doctrines of individual right, have lost 
the sense of loyalty, and have filled their minds 



Church and State. 47 

with Utopias of equality, which really involve 
the negation of the division and co-operation of 
labour — i.e., of all social organization. The aim 
of all social reform, therefore, must he to bring 
hack that willing subordination to leaders inspired 
by the sense of social duty, which characterized 
the military regime in its best form. But this, 
in the decay of theology, and the consequent 
loss of influence by the Catholic Church, requires 
the development of a new social doctrine based 
upon science, and the rise of a new spiritual 
power to teach and apply it to modern society. 
The State cannot be perfectly organized without 
the revival of the Church, for it is the wider 
spiritual unity of humanity that alone can give 
renewed strength to the bonds of material order 
in the State. 

The great achievement of the Middle Ages The church, 
was the separation of the spiritual from the 
temporal power. This has often been taken 
as a historical accident, but really it was the 
necessary expression of the true relation of theory 
and practice, which, in their demands and re- 
quirements, are essentially opposed, and which 
therefore cannot be fully developed except in 



48 The Social Philosophy of Comte. '-. 

relative independence of each other. Theory is 
general, and cannot attain its highest point unless 
it is universal. Practice is particular, and its 
greatest success is the fruit of concentration upon 
special circumstances and objects. Theory there- 
fore becomes stunted, and loses its freedom and 
impartiality, if it is brought into close connection 
with the narrower aims of the outward life. 
Practice, on the other hand, loses little by the 
egoism of personal will and desire, and, indeed, 
within proper limits requires it. To gain the 
full benefit of this distinction, we must adopt 
with all its consequences the mediaeval division 
of clergy and laity, Church and State. On the 
one hand, therefore, we must reduce the State 
to the dimensions of a city, with its proper 
complement of rural domain, " for experience 
has proved that the city, when completed, and 
sufficiently supported by material resources, is 
the largest political society that can be produced 
and maintained without oppression " ; as it is 
also the society which secures the most definite 
and specialized reaction of man's social activity 
on the physical medium by which he is sur- 
rounded. Further, within the city so constituted. 



The Social Order. 4Q 

we must have as intensive a division of labour 
as possible, the government being concentrated 
in the hands of those capitalists whose occupa- 
tions are of the greatest generality (i.e., the 
bankers) ; the other capitalists (merchants, manu- 
facturers, and agriculturists) taking their rank 
according to the same principle ; and the pro- 
letaires following, organized in fraternal equality. 
Finally, the various offices are to be handed 
down from one generation to another according 
to the principle of " heredite* sociocratique," each 
official choosing his successor, subject to the 
approval of his superiors ; for this, and not the 
anarchic principle of the choice of superiors by 
inferiors, is the true modern principle of govern- 
ment, which succeeds to the old method of 
inheritance by birth. On the other hand, the 
order of the priesthood is to be in everything 
the exact opposite of the order of the laity. 
In the first place, motives of personal interest 
are to be excluded, so far as possible, from their 
lives. There is to be no competition of trade 
among them, but all spiritual work is to be 
paid by salaries from the public, and these 
salaries are to be fixed at so low a rate, even 

D 



•50 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

in the case of the highest members of the order, 
that there shall be no inducement to enter the 
order from motives of cupidity. In the second 
place, although there will necessarily be a certain 
subordination of rank, in order to secure discipline 
and combined action, and all the priesthood will 
be arranged in a hierarchy under the "grand 
Pretre de l'Humanite," yet there must be no 
specialization of function, or division of labour 
among them. The modern anarchy of science is, 
as Comte maintains, due to the fact, that scientific 
men are mostly specialists ; and his priests there- 
fore are to be trained in all science, from mathe- 
matics, through physics, chemistry, and biology, 
to sociology and morals — for which last all the 
other sciences are to be regarded, as preparatory. 
In this way the "esprit d'ensemble" will prevail 
among them, and science will be preserved from 
its present uncertain aberrations into regions from 
which no gain can be brought back for the fur- 
therance of humanity. Nay, Comte appears to 
regard even the separation of Art from Science as 
a step toward anarchy, and demands that his 
priesthood should be the artistic as well as the 
philosophic teachers of men. At the . same time 



The Work of the Priesthood. 51 

they must avoid, as the most fatal source of cor- 
ruption, all tendency to interfere more directly in 
practical affairs. Their business is to "modify 
the wills, without ever commanding the acts of 
men," and they cannot preserve the universality 
which is their characteristic without a complete 
renunciation of the right to compel. The farthest 
point to which they may go in this direction, is to 
excommunicate, or affix a social stigma on offen- 
ders ; which, however, in a positivist society, will 
be a sufficiently severe punishment. 

Such a priesthood will be the natural repre- The priest . 

• r> i • hood of 

sentatives of the unity or solidarity of mankind, as humanity, 
opposed to the particular interests of individuals 
and classes. They will also be the represen- 
tatives of the continuity of the life of humanity, 
in the past and the future, as opposed to the 
excessive claims of the present hour. It will be 
their duty to make men conscious that their 
occupations are social functions, and that every- 
thing that is valuable in their lives has been 
gained for them by the long-continued labours of 
humanity, whose gratuitous gifts it is their highest 
privilege to preserve, and hand down increased 
by their own contributions to posterity. The 



52 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

clergy will thus be, as in the old system, the 
natural allies of the women; for what they have 
to do is simply to generalize and support, by a 
complete scientific view of the world and of 
human life, those lessons of the heart which are 
first learned by man in the narrower circle of the 
family. By their encyclopaedic view of know- 
ledge, the intelligence, which under the dispersive 
regime of science has become a rebel against the 
heart, is to be brought back to its allegiance, and 
the civic and human relations to be reconstituted 
on the type of the family. 
Thepracti- In impressing such a view of life upon man- 

calworkof r O JT 

the chmcb. kindj the p ositivist Church will avail itself of all 
the aids of art, and will use the power of imagin- 
ation to fill up those voids and imperfections 
which sober science undoubtedly leaves in our 
knowledge of things. For it is the function of 
poetry not merely to give body and substance to 
the necessarily abstract ideas of science ; it may 
even, justifiably, outrun the possibilities of know- 
ledge, though in that case we must not forget the 
unverified nature of the illusions to which we 
yield. In the first of these uses Art will give 
precision and force to the worship of Humanity, 



Poetry and Truth. 53 

or of its representative — Woman. It will provide 
language for those exercises of prayer and praise, 
by which we make vivid and real to ourselves our 
union with others, and dedicate ourselves to a life 
of " Altruism." It will thus intensify and deepen 
the subjective life, through which past humanity 
lives in us, and enable us to look forward with 
joy to our only personal reward, that of being 
incorporated in Humanity, and living again in 
the subjective life of others. For " toute Ve'ducation 
liu maim doit preparer ehacun a vicrc pour autrui, 
<ifin do vivre dans autrui ;" which is the true 
social doctrine of immortality, as opposed to the 
anti-social doctrine of an objective immortality for 
ourselves. The other use of poetry, in which it 
transcends the strict limits of science, is to revive 
something like the early fetichist belief that 
everything lives and is moved by human desires 
and affections. Thus, as a matter of fact, the 
inorganic world, so far as we know it, is governed 
by a fatality which is indifferent to the well-being 
of man. Nay, in its first action, it seems to call 
forth those tendencies in us which most need to 
be repressed and subdued. And it is only by 
the providence of Humanity that this very hos- 



54 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

tility and opposition of Nature are made instru- 
mental to the attainment of a higher good. Yet, 
the victory being won, we may be allowed, at least 
in poetic rapture, to forget the discord between 
man and the world he inhabits ; or to regard it as 
existing only with a view to that higher good 
which has resulted from it. For, " I 'existence 
humaine ne s'informe guere du temps qui exigea so, 
preparation spontande." When we consider Nature 
as summed up in man, we learn " to love the 
natural order as the basis of the artificial order," 
produced by humanity, " so as to renew, under 
a better form, the fetichist affections." In his 
last work, Comte carries this extension of poetic 
license to its farthest point, and bids us acid to 
our adoration of humanity, as the " Grand Etre," 
an adoration of space, as the " Grand Milieu," and 
of the earth, as the " Grand Fetiche " ; and he 
would have us think of these two as yearning for 
the birth and development of Humanity. In 
Comte's system, therefore, as in a more familiar 
text, " the earnest expectation of the creature 
waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of 
God " ; and that optimism, which is rejected at 
the beginning as truth, is brought in at the 



The Positive Life. 55 

end as poetry. Only, poetry is not, as with the 
Apostle, the anticipation or foretaste of know- 
ledge; it is the substitute provided because 
knowledge is absent and unattainable. 

For our purpose it is not necessary to go 
beyond this point. The minute prescriptions of 
the fourth volume of the " Politique Positive " add 
little or nothing to the general meaning of the 
system. The positivist New Jerusalem is as 
definitely determined and measured as the Holy 
City of the Apocalypse ; but the main interest of 
such details is for the church and not for the 
world. 



56 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 



CHAPTER IL 

THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF COMTE's PHILOSOPHY HIS 

OPPOSITION TO METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 

Growth of a new view of the social organism opposed at once to 
Individualism and Socialism — Comte and the German Idealists 
— Meaning of his attack on Metaphysic — His real agreement 
with modern metaphysicians — He adopts Locke's principles 
as to knowledge, yet is opposed to the Individualism of Locke's 
French disciples — He attacks Religion as a Nominalist and 
Nominalism as a Realist, and is really guided by a higher 
principle than either — His mistaken attitude towards the 
Critical Philosophy — Relation of Philosophy to Science — It 
makes men conscious of their guiding principles — Comte 's un- 
consciousness of the categories that guide his thought — Con- 
sequent defects in his view of the development of Religion, of 
Philosophy, and of Science — Mr. Spencers criticism and 
LittrSs answer — Ambiguity in the opposition between the 
universal and the particular. 

In the previous chapter I have given a sketch 
of Comte's system, and especially of that part of 
it which has attracted least attention in this 
country — the social philosophy of the " Politique 



New Views of the Social Bond. 57 

Positive." In this and the subsequent chapters 
I propose to make a few criticisms on the system, 
with the view of exhibiting the fundamental ten- 
dencies of thought which are manifested in it, 
and of contrasting the manifestation of those 
tendencies in Comte, with their manifestation 
in other writers, especially in the great German 
idealists of the beginning of this century, In 
these criticisms I shall observe the same relative 
limitation as in the previous chapter, and shall 
give most attention to the social and religious 
results of Comte's philosophy. As, however, it 
is impossible to separate these from the philo- 
sophical principles upon which .they are based, 
it will be necessary, in the first place, to examine 
the ideas of Comte as to the development of 
human thought in general, and of science in 
particular. 

Comte, like every great writer, was a son of Tendency 

of Comte's 

his time ; and his greatness is measured by the time to a 

° " new view of 

degree in which he brought to articulate expres- organism, 
sion the ideas which were unconsciously, or half 
consciously, working upon the minds of those 
around him. The great emancipating movement 
of thought in the eighteenth century, which found 



•58 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

its clearest expression in the works of Hume and 
Voltaire, and which was kindled into revolution- 
ary passion by Kousseau, awakened, by way of 
reaction, an equally extreme movement both in 
theory and practice, toward the reassertion of 
authority and social order. But in the midst of 
this flux and reflux of the popular consciousness, 
and still more after the extreme limits of each of 
these movements became clearly marked, a new 
idea was gradually taking possession of all minds 
that could rise above the atmosphere of party. 
Emancipation, pushed to the extent of isolating 
the individual from that general life through 
which alone he can become a moral, or even a 
rational being, and rebellion, pushed to the ex- 
tent of severing the present from that past upon 
which it is necessarily based, had for their natural 
counterparts an equally exaggerated panic of re- 
action, and an equally indiscriminate admiration 
of past forms of thought and life. Even in Eous- 
seau the idea of savage isolation is crossed by 
longing reminiscences of the patriarchal state, and 
of the republics of antiquity ; and the romantic 
spirit, with its revival of mediaeval types and 
models, soon began to spread through the litera- 



The Social Organism. 59 

ture of Europe, and to affect its social and political 
life. Between these opposing tendencies the con- 
ception of society as a unity, yet not a mechanical 
but an organic unity, of living and independent 
members, presented itself as the reconciliation of 
socialism and individualism, or, in other words, 
of the opposing interests of unity and freedom. 
And with this came another kindred idea — 
ih,. idea of development or organic evolution — 
which made it possible to admit men's obliga- 
tions to the past without denying the claims of 
the present and the future. Condorcet, Kant, 
and Edmund Burke are three writers of very 
different temper and tendency, but in all of them 
"we find this consciousness of the organic unity 
and evo lution of t he life of men and nations. 
All equally oppose the crude theory of a Social 
Contract and recognize that the unity of the 
State or of Society is something better "than a 
partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and 
coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low 
concern, to be taken up for a little temporary 
interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the 
parties ; " that it is, on the contrary, " a partner- 
ship in all science, a partnership in all art, a 



60 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

partnership in every virtue, and in all perfec- 
tion." All equally recognize that the social state, 
to which they look forward as the ideal of the 
future, cannot be merely an historical accident, 
or a success achieved by the skilful contrivance 
of individuals ; but that it must be the final 
realization of a principle, which has been working 
through all the past history of man, and which 
has underlain not only the old order of European 
civilization but also the movement of rebellion 
against it."" Finally, after Kant's suggestive, 
though imperfect, application of it to history, the 
same idea, with a deeper metaphysical perception 
of its meaning, became the central thought in the 
philosophies of Schelling and Hegel as early as 
the first years of this century. 
Analogous Comte, ignorant for the most part of the work 

tendencies 

and irTthe °f an 7 exce pt his French predecessors, was led to 

idealists the same fundamental conception by the political 

experiences of France, as well as by the conflict 

of the opposite schools of Eousseau and St. Simon 

* This is not strictly accurate, for Condorcet seems to 
except from his list of the elements of progress the whole 
social and ecclesiastical system which existed previous to 
the Revolution, while Burke can see no element of growth 
or improvement in the Revolution itself. 



Relation to German Idealism. 61 

with each other and with the Catholic De Maistre. 
Yet, despite this independence, there is a certain 
parallelism between Conite's interpretation of the 
idea of development and that of the German 
idealists. That the first " Synthesis," or system 
of doctrine upon which man's intellectual and 
moral life is based, was poetic or imaginative ; 
that it was therefore disintegrated and destroyed 
by the critical understanding ; and that it re- 
quires to be restored and reconstituted on a 
rational basis, a basis which shall satisfy the a- 
wakened intelligence, as well as the heart and the 
moral sympathies — all this was a commonplace. 
of German philosophy long before the advent of 
positivism.""" The condemnation which Comte 
pronounced upon the individualistic and revolu- 
tionary theories of Rousseau is little more than an 
echo of the Germaii_at tack upon the "_Aufklar- 
ung." Even Conite's denunciation of the " meta- 
physical " explanation of the world by transcen- 
dent causes or " entities," which are not capable 
of empirical verification, and his assertion that 
man's knowledge is confined to the relative and 

* Cf. especially Fichte's Characteristics of the Present 
Age. Many of Carlyle's characteristic expressions and 
ideas seem to have been suggested by this book. 



62 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

phenomenal, finds a close parallel in the lang- 
uage of Kant. And Kant's idealistic followers, 
though they assert the possibility of a knowledge 
that goes beyond the phenomenal, do not assert it 
in the sense in which Comte denies it ; for with 
them the negation of an absolute dualism between 
the noumenal and phenomenal is, as will after- 
wards be shown, only the necessary result of the 
doctrine of the relativity of knowledge itself. In 
all ways, therefore, the question between Comte 
and those whom he would have called metaphys- 
icians is of a much more definite and specific 
kind than he or his followers have generally re- 
cognized. The general basis of thought — which 
belongs rather to the time than to any indi- 
vidual — is common to him with all the greater 
philosophic writers of his own, and even of the 
preceding generation. And the only point for 
controversy is whether he gave the most con- 
sistent and satisfactory development to those 
principles, which we cannot indeed say that he 
derived from others, but which he was certainly 
not the first to express. The question in short 
is, in the first place, how far Comte had a clear 
consciousness of the source and bearing of his 



His Negations. 63 

own leading ideas; and, in the second place, how 
far lie has heen successful in applying them. I 
venture to think that in both points of view a 
careful examination of his works shows him to 
be defective. He fails to apprehend with clear- 
ness the logic by which his own thoughts are 
guided, he fails to follow out that logic to its 
legitimate result, and his system, therefore, with 
all its comprehensiveness, ends in inconsistency 
and self-contradiction. 

In the first place, then, Comte's starting-point Meaning of 

his attack 

was fixed for him by the sensationalist philosophy °? m . eta - J 

" r x " physic and 

of the last century. He begins where Hume t ieo ogy ' 
ends, with the denial of the scientific value of 
metaphysics and theology. This denial he only 
modifies so far as to maintain that, while neither 
theology nor metaphysics can be regarded as 
forms of real knowledge, both must be regarded 
as necessary stages in the process by which real 
knowledge is attained. They are, in short, transi- 
tory forms of thought, which now survive only 
as stages in the culture of childhood and youth, 
or as prejudices in the minds of those who have 
not yet heen awakened to the spirit of their 
time. Notwithstanding this wholesale rejection 



64 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

of metaphysic and theology, however, it may 
easily be shown that Comte's own theory, like 
every intelligible view of the world, involves a 
metaphysic, and ends in a theology ; and that he 
only succeeds in concealing this from himself, 
because he is unconscious of the presuppositions 
he makes, because he uses the word " meta- 
physic " in a narrow and mistaken sense, and 
because he conceives it, as well as theology, to 
be bound up with a kind of " transcendentalism," 
which all the great metaphysicians of modern 
times agree in rejecting. 
His real Hostility to metaphysic, if by metaphysic be 

moderlr -meant the explanation of the facts of experience 
cians. by entities or causes, which cannot be verified 
in experience or shown to stand in any definite 
relation to it, is the common feature of all 
modern philosophy, idealist or sensationalist. 
It is as clearly manifested in Descartes as in 
Bacon, in Kant and Hegel as in Locke and 

7 O 

Hume. If Bacon accuses the scholastics of 
anticipating nature by unverified hypotheses or 
presuppositions not derived from the study of 
nature, Descartes is no less emphatic in his 
denunciation of a philosophy of authority, and 



What is Metaphysics 65 

in his demand for a fundamental reconstruction 
of belief. If the former bases all truth upon 
experience, does not the latter seek the evidence 
of his principles in the most intimate of experi- 
ences, the consciousness of self ? Leibnitz is as 
ready as Locke, Kant is as ready as Hume, to 
maintain that philosophy must not introduce 
transcendent principles into its explanations of 
experience. As Luther rejected a God who did 
not reveal himself directly to the heart and in- 
telligence of his worshipper, but only through 
the mediation of a priest and in an external 
tradition, so the greatest modern philosophers of 
all schools are agreed in rejecting all principles 
which do not find their evidence in being an 
integral part of the experience of men. It 
would be too much to say that they all con- 
sistently develop this principle to its necessary 
consequence, or that traces of scholastic modes 
of thought are not to be found even in those of 
them who most strongly denounce scholasticism ; 
on the contrary, it may be admitted that no 
one before Kant saw what was involved in the 
renunciation of the transcendent as an object of 

knowledge. Even Kant himself did not see all 

E 



€6 The Social Philosophy of C orate. 

its consequences. Still, the assertion of the prin- 
ciple itself, and the effort to realize it, is perhaps 
the most general and invariable characteristic of 
modern philosophy. In so far, therefore, as what 
Comte means by metaphysics is anything like 
the scholastic philosophy, with its transcendent 
or authoritative principles, no objection need be 
taken to his assertion that metaphysic is an ex- 
ploded mode of thought, from which the philo- 
sopher and the man of science must now seek 
to free themselves. But then it must be added 
that, in this sense, none of the greater specula- 
tive writers of modern times is, in principle, a 
metaphysician ; and that the metaphysic which 
they cultivate is of a totally different nature. 
If, indeed, we could consider Comte's remarks 
as aimed at the great metaphysicians of his 
own day, at Kant and his successors, the de- 
scription, and therefore the censure founded 
upon it, would be almost ludicrously inappli- 
cable, 
msantece- To understand the bearing of Comte's denial 

dents. 

theOT eS of °f me taphysics, however, we must keep in view 

nowe ge. j^ g historical antecedents. This negation was, as 

I have already said, part of his heritage from the 



Locke's Neiv Way of Ideas. 07 

sensationalist philosophy of the last century, which 
had reached its most consequent and definite ex- 
pression in Hume. It was a conclusion, the first 
step towards which was taken by Locke in his 
attack upon the Cartesian doctrine of innate 
ideas. In Locke's view, innate ideas were prin- 
ciples apprehended independently of all experi- 
ence — possessions of the individual mind which 
it finds in itself at once, and apart from any 
process of development, or intercourse with any- 
thing but itself. And, to disprove their exist- 
ence, it was enough for him to point to the fact 
that, prior to such intercourse with the world, 
the mind has no contents at all, and can scarcely 
be said even to exist. This obvious truth, how- 
ever, was immediately confused by him with the 
doctrine that reality — the objective world of in- 
dividual things as such— is immediately given in 
sense apart from any " work of the mind," and 
that any ideas or universals added by thought 
to the data of sense, must, ipso facto, be fictions. 
In making this assumption, Locke was yielding to 
a tendency of thought which had already shown 
itself in the nominalism of Hobbes. Locke, in- 
deed, was not a nominalist, he was what is called 



68 The Social Philosophy of Connie. 

a conceptualist ; but in the Essay on the Human 
Understanding no distinct ground is ever stated 
for giving to universals more than that subjective 
value which even Hobbes allows to them. In 
his criticism of the ideas of substance and cause, 
Locke is always seeking to reduce fact and reality 
to the isolated sensations through which, as he 
supposes, individual things are given. And the 
same tendency of thought leads him also to re- 
gard the individual mind as apprehensive only 
of its own ideas and sensations, and excluded 
from all direct contact with the world. It 
soon, however, became obvious to the followers 
of Locke, that, on these terms, no knowledge, or 
even semblance of knowledge, is possible; that 
the individual mind, if it were thus confined to 
its own isolated feelings, could never dream of 
the existence of an objective world ; and that 
to make possible the reference of sensations to 
objects, it is necessary that they should be con- 
nected together according to general principles. 
In other words, it became obvious that the uni- 
versal, or some substitute for the universal, is 
required to make knowledge and experience 
possible. And to meet this want the theory 



The Association of Ideas. G9 

of association was devised, and the atomic ele- 
ments of the intelligible given in sense, were 
supposed to be linked together by the prin- 
ciples of resemblance, contiguity, and succession. 
It was not perceived that in these principles 
there is already implied the unity of the self- 
conscious intelligence, and, indeed, the whole 
body of categories which the theory of associa- 
tion is used to explain or explain away. It 
was the work of Kant to show this ; to show, 
in other words, that the attempt to empty 
knowledge of its universal element must be 
suicidal, that it must be fatal not only to 
theology and metaphysics, but to all knowledge, 
even of the simplest facts of experience. But 
Hume — and it may be added most of his Eng- 
lish followers, such as Mill and Mr. Spencer 
— halt half-way in the development of their 
sensationalism, and therefore think it possible 
to maintain, that while the ultimate reality of 
things is hid from us, because we cannot tran- 
scend our own ideas, we can still have knowledge 
of phenomena, because these ideas are combined 
in the minds of all men according to the same 
principles of association. It is from this point 



70 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

of view that Hume tells us that the principle of 
causality, based as it is upon mere association, 
may be fairly used to connect phenomena with 
each other, but that it is altogether insufficient 
to enable us to rise from phenomena to noumena 
— from the world to God. Thus the principles of 
the association of ideas are to the mind of man 
something like what wings are to the ostrich ; 
they help him to run on the ground, but they 
are not strong enough to make him fly. As 
a succedaneum for that universal element in 
thought, which would raise us to the know- 
ledge of things as they really are, they enable 
us to arrange the appearances — the shadows of 
our cave — and that, for the practical purposes 
of the cave, is all that we require. 
And the While the English followers of Locke thus 

social Atom- 

uponifby confined themselves to the development of his 
pasdists. ideas on the theory of knowledge, his French 
followers seized upon his individualistic theory 
of existence, and used it as an instrument to 
undermine the Catholic faith, and the whole 
political and social system connected therewith. 
Diderot and D'Holbach found in Atomism the 
readiest weapon to assail the popular theology. 



Dale rot and Rousseau. 71 

The former writer, indeed, sometimes plays with 
the atomic theory in a way that reminds us of 
the earth-shaking laughter of Aristophanes. In 
infinite time, he asks, in the infinite number of 
throws of the atomic dice, why should not, at 
one moment or another, a Cosmos spring out of 
chaos ? and the Abbe Galiani can only hint, by 
way of answer, that, somehow or other, " les des 
de la Nature sont pipes." Rousseau, applying 
the same idea to Sociology, proclaims the eman- 
cipation of the natural man, and develops the 
theory of the Social Contract, the theory which 
reduces the state to a creation of the individual 
will. Yet Rousseau had some uncertain glimpses 
of the truth that the individual has no rights or 
claims, except so far as he is an organ of the 
universal, and with strange inconsistency he de- 
clares, that it is only through social life that the 
human being " ceases to be a dull and limited 
animal, and becomes an intelligent being and a 
man." 

Now it is curious that Comte, while in his He accepts 

the former, 

theory of knowledge he accepts many of the ideas Jg£°* the 
of the school of Locke, in his social theory takes 
up a position of intense hostility to the results of 



li The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the same philosophy. That very individualism, 
which in Locke and Hume had been the ground 
and presupposition of the whole attack upon 
metaphysic, is assailed by Comte as the very es- 
sence of "metaphy sic. "The metaphysical spirit," 
he is never weary of saying, " is radically incom- 
patible with the social point of view ; " it has 
" never been able to escape from the sphere of 
the individual." From the empirical philosophy 
Comte accepted most of its negatives, especially 
its rejection of the possibility of metaphysics or 
theology as sciences of things in themselves, and 
its denial that even the principles, on which ex- 
perience is based, are themselves derived from 
anything but experience. But the school of 
Locke had generally denied the abstract uni- 
versal in favour of the equally abstract indi- 
vidual, and here Comte declines to follow them. 
Individualism is seen by him to be an inade- 
cpiate basis for social or even for biological 
theory, and the blame, as a matter of course, 
is cast upon metaphysics. The " fate of meta- 
physical theory," he declares, " is decided by its 
inability to conceive of man otherwise than in- 
dividually " ; whereas " the true human point of 



The Universal not unreal. 73 

view is not individual but social." " Man is a 
mere abstraction, and there is nothing real but 
humanity, regarded intellectually and yet more 
morally." # It is in fact just this thought of 
the unity and the solidarity of man — not the 
mere abstract unity of a genus, but the concrete 
unity of one life, manifesting itself in many mem- 
bers—which enables Comte to look at the history 
of the past in a way so different from most of his 
predecessors, and to recognize the affinity of that 
social synthesis of the future, which he himself 
is trying to realize, with the previous theological 
synthesis of Catholicism. It is this also which 
leads him to create a new religion of humanity, 
and even, in the end, to justify that poetic license 
which seems necessary to complete the synthetic 
view of life, and to bring nature into unity with 
man. In the " Politique Positive " Comte's oppo- 
sition to metaphysics as tending, in the language 
of Burke, to dissolve society " into the dust and 
powder of individuality," becomes even more 
emphatic ; and with it is combined a continual 
denunciation of the " dispersive regime " of the 
particular sciences, which in the present day he 
* Phil. Pos. vi. p. 692, Miss Martineau's Trans, ii. p. 508. 



74 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

declares to be pursued by mere specialists, with 
an extreme waste of human faculty, and without 
any regard to the legitimate end of all science, 
the furtherance of man's estate. The conception 
of life and science, as a connected whole, all 
whose parts are to be estimated and developed 
in relation to each other, and to the idea of the 
whole, is by Comte as firmly held and as reso- 
lutely carried out to its consequences as by the 
most extreme idealist or pantheist. The only 
difference — which still shows the trace of the 
individualistic philosophy out of which Positiv- 
ism was developed — is that the synthesis of 
Comte is, in his own language, subjective, not 
objective ; by which he means that the whole, in 
relation to which all things are to be interpreted, 
and of which the individual man is to be re- 
garded only as a part or member, is humanity, . 
and not the universe. In other words, Comte 
holds that we transcend the limits of knowledge 
when we seek to regard ourselves as parts of the 
universal whole or system of things, and therefore 
as living under the providence of God ; but that 
we do not transcend the limits of knowledge 
when we regard ourselves as parts of the one 



Homo Mensura. 75 

great organism of humanity, and therefore as 
living under its continual providence. We are 
not, as Berkeley and Hume had taught, confined 
to the phenomena of our individual conscious- 
ness ; but neither are we capable of reaching a 
purely objective point of view. We can see 
things from the point of view of a whole, hut not 
of the whole : at least we cannot so regard them 
except in that poetry of religion by which the 
earliest fetichist affections are renewed, and space 
and the earth are worshipped as the friends of 
Humanity. This, however, is mere poetic license ; 
for we have no reason to believe that man has 
any friend but himself, and in its first direct 
action upon him the world shows itself to be 
anything but a system arranged for his benefit. 

Now, without for the present discussing the He combines 

nominalism 

truth of this view, we may remark that it is ™* h real " 
obviously the result of a compromise between the 
two opposite tendencies of thought, which divided 
the earlier history of modern philosophy. In 
the Cartesian philosophy there was a tendency — 
which manifested itself fully in the two great- 
est followers of Descartes, in Malebranche and 
Spinoza — to regard all things from the point of 



76 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

view of the absolute unity of the Universe, and 
to treat the separate existence of the parts as a 
fiction of abstraction. On this view the indi- 
vidual's consciousness of himself as an individual 
is an illusion, and Spinoza would have said the 
same thing of his consciousness of himself as a 
member of the race. The only true consciousness 
is that in which both man and humanity are seen 
as absorbed in Nature, or, what is the same thing, 
in God. The followers of Locke, again, went so 
far in the opposite direction that they regarded 
the universal as a fiction of abstraction, and the 
individual as the sole reality. Hence they 
sought to. confine the individual in theory to 
the perception of his own sensitive states, and 
in practice to the seeking of pleasant, and the 
avoidance of painful, feelings. Comte steers a 
path midway between the two extremes. To 
him, as to Locke and Hume, Nature is the 
vainest of abstractions, the last delusion of meta- 
physics ; and all attempts to penetrate into the 
real being of things are the efforts of a finite 
creature to get beyond his own limits. Yet, on 
the other hand, to him, as to Spinoza, it seems 
irrational to separate the individual from the 



Introspective Psychology. 77 

whole to which he belongs, and therefore, Hu- 
manity, instead of being regarded as a vague 
abstraction like Nature, is asserted to be the 
most real of all things or beings. " Man is a 
mere abstraction, and there is nothing real but 
Humanity." And Comte is so far from saying 
that the individual is confined to the data of 
his own individual consciousness that he rather 
maintains that we are unable to know ourselves, 
except as we know something else. Thus in 
criticizing the psychological method of internal 
observation — which, by the way, he supposes to 
be the essential method of metaphysics — Comte 
says : — " This pretended psychological method is 
essentially defective, for consider to what suicidal 
procedures it immediately leads ; on the one 
side it bids you isolate yourself as far as possible 
from every external perception, and therefore 
prohibits you from carrying on any intellectual 
labour ; for if you are employed in any, even 
the simplest calculation, what would become of 
the internal observation ? On the other hand, 
after having finally by elaborate effort and ar- 
rangement attained this perfect state of intel- 
lectual slumber, you are called upon to watch 



78 The Social Philosophy of G orate. 

the operations which are going on in your mind, 
when in fact there is nothing going on at all."* 
Comte sees the absurdity of a psychological 
method, in which the mind is isolated from the 
world and treated as one object among the others 
which have to be observed, instead of being- 
regarded as a " part of all it knows," although 
he does not clearly indicate the source of the 
error. But the only result, as we have seen, is 
a compromise, in which the individual is sup- 
posed to be capable of objective knowledge, 
though only of phenomena, and capable also 
of objective aims, which, however, he cannot 
identify with the absolute end of all things. 
We can know, in Comte's opinion, not merely 
what is relative to our individual minds, but 
to the human mind ; and we can seek as our end, 
not merely our own individual pleasure but the 
happiness of Humanity. But we cannot know 
what things really are, apart from their appear- 
ance to us : we cannot worship any God who is 
in nature as in man, or identify ourselves with 
any divine purpose which reaches beyond the 
compass of this transitory existence. Whether 
*Phil. Pos. i. p. 36. 



Comtes Metaphysic. 79 

this compromise is more than a compromise, 
whether it is a true solution of the difficulty, 
or a reconciliation of the opposite tendencies 
of thought in a higher unity, we have yet 
to consider. 

The point, however, to which I wish here to He is reaUy 

guided by 

call attention is, that Comte's protest against ^ ei th i^ in - 
metaphysic loses almost all its weight because 
of his ignorance of the real scope and tendency 
of the metaphysical theories of the past, and of 
his own relation to them. He seems to have no 
perception of the essential distinction between 
the two tendencies of thought which he is partly 
opposing and partly reconciling. Beginning with 
a denunciation of metaphysic, because it treats 
universals as real entities, he ends by insisting 
on the truth that the Family, State, and Hu- 
manity, though they undoubtedly are universals, 
are at the same time objectively real. In the 
attempt to rise above the abstractions of earlier 
thought he is in harmony with the best meta- 
physics of his time. The defect lies in his 
unconsciousness of his own metaphysic, i.e., of 
the categories which rule his thought, and which 
enable him to interpret the facts of experience, 



80 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

and especially the facts of man's social life, so 
differently from his predecessors. For him, in- 
deed, there is an easy explanation of this differ- 
ence between himself and the philosophers of an 
earlier time. They were " metaphysical," while 
he is not ; they made assumptions, and substi- 
tuted their own ideas for the teaching of experi- 
ence, while he has simply made his mind into a 
mirror of nature, and stated the facts as they are. 
Comte forgets what his own principles led him 
on other occasions to perceive, that the world is 
what it is to us by the development of our own 
thoughts, and that we find in it only what we 
are prepared to find. Locke also, when he at- 
tacked the Cartesians, seemed to himself to be 
substituting experience for mere ideas, reality 
for fiction. He did not observe that he was 
substituting for the presupposition that the uni- 
versal alone is real, the opposite presupposition 
that the individual alone is real ; and that the 
one presupposition is as much an idea as the 
other. And Comte, in his turn, guided by his 
new organic idea of social life and development, 
advances to the attack upon the individualistic 
philosophy, with the same naive confidence that 



The Critical Philosophy. 81 

his idea is not an idea at all, but a fact. With 
all his talk of experience, he has never asked, or 
he has not understood the hearing of the Kantian 
question, What is experience ? For if he had 
done so, he must have discovered that his own 
so-called positive thought was as metaphysical as 
that either of the Eealists or of the Nominalists, 
and was indeed possible only as the result of a 
development which included both. 

It is true that Comte in his " Politique Posi- His view of 

*- the critical 

tive " refers to Kant's criticism of experience, p " L "' up 5 ' 
though in a way that seems to show that his 
knowledge was derived only from hearsay. 
Kant is supposed by him to be a philosopher 
who first extended to the mind the general 
biological truth of the action and reaction of 
organism and medium upon each other. Be- 
cause of this action and reaction, in which the 
mind modifies the object, as well as the object 
the mind, our thoughts do not correspond to the 
reality of things in themselves ; they do not 
represent the medium as it is, but only as it 
appears to us, and our conception of the world 
is not therefore absolute, but only relative. On 
the other hand, we must not exaggerate this 



82 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

truth so far as to suppose that the development 
of our thought is purely subjective ; or, in other 
words, that it belongs to the mind apart from the 
action of the world upon it (a view which Comte 
attributes to the German idealists). The true 
theory is " to regard the world as furnishing the 
matter, and the mind the form, in every positive 
notion. The fusion of these elements cannot 
take place except by reciprocal sacrifices. Ex- 
cess of objectivity would hinder every general 
view, for generality implies abstraction. But 
the analysis which permits us to abstract would 
be impossible, unless we could suppress the 
natural excess of subjectivity. Every man, as 
he compares himself with others, spontaneously 
takes away from his observations that which is 
peculiar to himself, in order to realize that social 
agreement which constitutes the main end of 
contemplative life ; but the degree of subjectivity 
which is common to all our species usually 
remains, and remains without any serious incon- 
venience. Nor could we reduce its amount, 
■except by intellectual intercourse with the other 
animals, an intercourse which is rare and imper- 
fect. Besides, however we might restrict or 



The Critical Philosophy. 83 

diminish the subjective influences that mould 
our thoughts, in the effort to come to an under- 
standing' with intelligences unlike our own, still 
our conceptions could never attain to a pure 
objectivity. It is, therefore, as impossible as it 
is useless to determine exactly the respective 
contributions of the internal and the external in 
the production of knowledge." '"" 

It is easy from this passage to see that Comte Kant's real 

J x a view of 

has not fully apprehended the bearing of the nowese - 
Kantian criticism. Kant does not seek to show 
that knowledge springs out of the action and 
reaction of subject and object on each other, 
but that there are certain universals, or forms 
of thought, by which the intelligence must de- 
termine the matter of sense ere we can know 
objects as such. The question which he dis- 
cusses is, how experience, and objects of experi- 
ence, as such, are possible. Kant would not, 
therefore, say that it is impossible " to determine 
exactly the respective contributions of the inter- 
nal and the external in the production of know- 
ledge ; " but that the problem is an absurd one, 
since subject and object are correlative elements 
* Pol. Pos. ii. 38 



84 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

in the unity of knowledge, and not two separate 

things, by the action and reaction of which upon 

each other knowledge is produced. The unity of 

experience is incapable of being transcended, and 

it is a false abstraction by which we attempt to 

take either subject or object out of that unity, 

and seek to determine it as a thing in itself. 

The intelligi and the esse of things are one, in 

such a sense, that it is transcending the limits 

of experience to attempt to determine either of 

these apart from the other.* All knowledge or 

experience implies and presupposes the unity of 

the knowing mind and the categories through 

which it determines its objects, and it is only in 

virtue of these that there exists for us any 

objective world of experience at all. Hence to 

leave out the intelligence in our account of the 

intelligible, to forget the constitutive power of 

thought in speaking of existence (as is done by 

materialistic and so-called empirical theories), is 

* It is, no doubt, inconsistent with this that Kant 
could admit the existence of a thing in itself, which 
produces sensations in us, as in many passages he seems 
to do. But it would carry us too far to discuss this 
subject here. Comte, it may be admitted, could have 
found many things in the letter of Kant to give plausi- 
bility to his view. Cf. below p. 124. 



The Work of Philosophy. 8'5 

to mutilate and distort the essential facts of the 
case. 

This Kantian view of nature and experience ™-ects ti.e 
leads directly to certain important conclusions as of science. ' 
to the work of philosophy. For, if its truth he 
admitted, it necessarily follows that the ordinary 
consciousness of men — even the ordinary scien- 
tific consciousness — is, in its view of the world 
essentially abstract and imperfect. The ordi- 
nary consciousness generally, we might even say 
invariably, deals with objects as if they were 
given independently of any thinking subject. 
It proceeds as if an intelligible world could 
exist without an intelligence, and thus leaves 
out of account an element, and indeed the most 
important element, in the facts of experience. 
And the business of the philosopher or meta- 
physician must be to correct the abstractness of 
ordinary, even of scientific, thought, to bring to 
clear consciousness the element which they ne- 
glect, and to determine how the new insight 
into the nature of knowledge, which by this 
process he has attained, must modify and trans- 
form our previous view of the objects known. 
In doing so, the metaphysician (or transcen- 



86 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

dentalist, as Kant calls him) is not introducing 
a new method ; he is simply following the 
method according to which we are continually 
obliged to correct and complete the results of 
one science by another. Science is necessarily 
abstract, in so far as it investigates and deter- 
mines certain aspects and relations of things, 
apart from their other aspects and relations. 
Thus, in geometry, abstraction is made of every- 
thing except the relations of lines and figures 
in space, in order that the spatial conditions 
of things may be fully determined, apart from 
their other conditions. And in like manner> 
" the dynamic laws of weight would still be 
unknown to us, unless we had first abstracted 
all consideration of the resistance, or the motion, 
of the atmosphere or other medium." The 
science of political economy is based on an 
effort to isolate, so far as is possible, the econo- 
mical from all the other conditions of social life. 
In short, all the separate sciences, in this point 
of view, are abstract ; and they tend to become 
more and more abstract as the scientific division 
of labour increases. That is, they tend to con- 
fine themselves to the investigation of certain 



Philosophy corrects Abstraction. 87 

definite relations of objects, leaving out of ac- 

count all their other relations ; or (what comes 
to much the same thing) to the examination of 
certain definite objects, without taking into 
account their manifold relations to other objects. 
Now, as Comte himself says, " these preliminary 
simplifications without which there could be no 
such thing as science in the true sense of the 
word, always involve a corresponding process 
of recomposition, when prevision of actual fact 
is called for." To attain a complete view of the 
truth, we must return from the abstraction of the 
isolated sciences to the unity of nature, in which 
all these separate objects and relations are brought 
together, and in which they modify and determine 
each other. And philosophy only goes a step 
farther in the same direction, when it corrects 
that abstraction from the thinking self, the 
unity of knowledge, which is common to all 
the sciences. The only difference is, that the 
abstraction of science from the unity of the 
objective world, as it is the result of a definite 
act of thought, is generally conscious ; while the 
abstraction which philosophy seeks to correct is 
generally unconscious. The geometrician cannot 



88 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

but see that there are other than spatial con- 
ditions of existence, and that, for his own pur- 
poses, he has left all such conditions out of 
account. But it is quite possible, as every 
day's experience proves, to investigate the laws 
of the intelligible world, without ever adverting 
to its necessary relation to the intelligence, and 
without being conscious of the abstractness of a 
view of things, in which this relation is left out 
of account. Philosophy, therefore, has to detect 
and bring to the light of day certain facts or 
relations which enter into the constitution of 
things, which indeed are presupposed in all 
our consciousness of them, but which, never- 
theless, generally escape without notice. Of 
this work of philosophy or metaphysics, how- 
ever, Comte has no idea, or he confuses it with 
the methods of an empirical psychology, which, 
by an opposite abstraction, would separate the 
thinking mind from the world to which it is 
related. But the method of philosophy is not 
mere abstraction ; it is rather, if the expression 
may be allowed, concretion. Philosophy, as 
Hegel said, is " thinking things together " — 
i.e., thinking them in a unity that transcends 



Philosophy is Self-consciousness. 89 

and explains their differences ; or, if it ever 
abstractly considers the unity and movement 
< )f thought in itself, it is only (as geometry abs- 
tractly considers the relations of space) in order 
more surely and clearly to discern that unity 
and movement in all the objects of thought. 

It is to Kant, principally, that this new way ^^ Ac 
of stating the problem of philosophy is due ; but S^otus 

guiding 

it would be altogether a mistake to suppose that principles, 
he essentially 'changed the problem itself. Meta- 
physicians, from the time of Socrates and Plato, 
have always sought to get beyond the presuppo- 
sitions of the ordinary consciousness, and to re- 
mould that consciousness by bringing to light the 
principles upon which it rests. One of the best 
definitions that has been given of philosophy is 
" clear self-consciousness." And it is, indeed, 
just this character of metaphysical thought which 
renders plausible Comte's attack upon it. It is 
in the metaphysical writers of the past that we 
can most clearly discern the errors of the past, 
for by these writers the errors of the past are 
not merely implied and presupposed, but explic- 
itly stated. Hence such writers are continually 
suffering from that natural illusion by which we 



DO The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

take, as the prominent representatives of an idea 
or tendency of thought, those authors by whom 
it has been most distinctly expressed ; whereas it 
is rather they who first enable us, even if they 
do not enable themselves, to see the limitations 
of that idea or tendency, and to transcend it. 
But as it is in the metaphysicians that we find 
the clearest and most definite expressions of those 
defective principles of past thought which we are 
seeking to transcend, it is not unnatural that we 
should attribute the defect itself to metaphysic. 
What, however, is really due to metaphysic is 
not the error, but rather that clearness and de- 
finiteness of its expression which makes our re- 
futation of it and our higher point of view pos- 
sible. Thus the limit of Greek thought, the 
point at which, by its own development, it falls 
into error and self-contradiction, would have been 
by no means so easy to discern, if its presup- 
positions had not been raised into ideal clearness 
in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The indi- 
vidualism of the Stoics and Epicureans gives us a 
key, which we would otherwise want, to those new 
experiences of independence and isolation which 
came to men under the Empire of Borne, after 



Philosophy and Progress. 91 

the breaking up of the ancient municipal organ- 
ization of social life. Descartes and Spinoza re- 
veal the open secret of that new view of the 
relation of man to God, which was partly ex- 
pressed by Luther and Calvin, and which was so 
powerful in moulding the political and social life, 
especially of Protestant countries, and in awak- 
ing in them a consciousness of individual and 
national independence, combined with a still more 
intense consciousness that the individual is noth- 
ing, except as the servant of a higher power. 
Hence it was in a criticism of these philosophies 
that Locke and Leibnitz found the starting-point 
for their fuller assertion of the claims of the indi- 
vidual. Finally, it is through a struggle with 
Individualism, especially in its fullest expression 
in Hume and Rousseau, that Kant and his sue- 
cessors in Germany, and Comte in France, were 
led to that higher organic idea in which the indi- 
vidual and universal cease to be opposed to each 
other as reality to fiction, and come to be re- 
garded as different but complementary aspects of 
reality. If we no longer say, "The universal 
alone is real, and the individual is an abstrac- 
tion ; " or, " The individual alone is real, and the 



92 The. Social Philosophy of Comtc. 

universal is a name ; " but, " The individual is 
real, but only as the realization of the universal, 
and the universal is real, but only as manifesting 
itself in the individual," it is due to the whole 
past movement of philosophic thought. Nor, 
again, would it be difficult to show that the suc- 
cesses or failures of science at different times 
were closely connected with the sufficiency or 
insufficiency of the ultimate principles of think- 
ing then acknowledged or presupposed. For 
it is the development of man's spirit which en- 
ables him to ask and to answer new questions in 
regard to the world of objects ; nor can his 
growing knowledge of that world be separated 
from his growing consciousness of himself. To 
one who regards metaphysic from this point of 
view, its continual apparent failures will be as 
little suggestive of a despair of philosophy as the 
fall of the Greek State, or of the feudal system, 
is suggestive of a disbelief in the possibility of 
social and political life. It may even be said 
that no stage of culture, no limited form of 
human thought or existence, is ever completely 
exhausted and transcended, till it has risen to a 
clear consciousness of itself in a metaphysic, or 



Metaphysic of Positivism. {)'■> 

something' of the nature of a metaphysic. It 
is the disentanglement of the principle, the cen- 
tral idea, the fundamental category, which has pre- 
viously ruled men almost without their knowing- 
it, that first enables them to see its value and 
relation to that unity of the whole, with which 
it was necessarily confounded so long as it re- 
mained merely a moving force in the depths of 
the popular mind. Comte himself was meta- 
physical, in so far as he sought to transcend 
the one-sided and imperfect categories of earlier 
philosophy, and to reconcile them by means of 
a higher thought. His defect lay in this, that 
he was not metaphysical enough, that his analysis 
of his own thought was imperfect, and that la- 
was therefore the instrument of a movement of 
human intelligence, of the meaning of which 
lie was never clearly conscious. Otherwise he 
would have perceived that his " positive " stage 
was not simply a negation of the metaphysical 
and theological stages which preceded it and a 
return to fact and experience, hut that it was 
essentially a new reading of experience, which 
implied, therefore, a new form of metaphysics 
and theology. 



94 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

Comte's It is this unconsciousness of his own fuiida- 

unconscious- . . 

nessofws mental categories, which explains Comte s radical 

own guiding 

principles, misconception of the whole history of theology 
and metaphysics. The third stage of Positivism 
is not the unity which transcends, while it re- 
conciles, the previous stages of human develop- 
ment ; on the contrary, it involves the total re- 
nunciation of those principles of thought which 
had prevailed during the two previous stages. 
According to this view, all that we can say is, that 
a germ of positive thought existed from the first, 
and that, by its development, theology and meta- 
physics were gradually driven from the whole 
sphere of knowledge. Positivism is thus the 
concentration of human thought within certain 
limits, which at first it did not respect, but which 
it gradually learns to be, for it, impassable. And 
the only result of the process is, that the whole 
field of the non-phenomenal is abandoned to 
poetry, which is still to be permitted under 
certain restrictions to fill up the vacant spaces 
of the unknowable with shapes drawn according 
to our wishes. Theology and metaphysics are 
but more or less thinly disguised anthropo- 
morphisms, which once subserved a social pur- 



Development by Negation. 95 

pose, and which apart from that purpose have no 
value for the intelligence; nor is there any element 
of truth in them which needs to be preserved 
under the new intellectual regime. Their history 
was not a development, but a purely negative pro- 
cess — a process whereby they became attenuated 
and dissolved, until the rich concrete meaning of 
the first Fetichism had entirely disappeared in the 
negations of the revolutionary philosophy. Mono- 
theism, the last religion, was but the bare ab- 
stract residuum of theology, as the idea of Na- 
ture was the last abstract residuum of meta- 
physics. And the whole result of the long 
striving of human intelligence to penetrate into 
the absolute is merely the knowledge of its own 
limits. 

Now, it is not too much to say that this view consequent 

defect in hi; 

involves a fundamental misrepresentation, and ^kj- the 

. f. i . • ment of 

even inversion, of the whole history ot religion religion 
and philosophy. Its plausibility at first sight 
arises from a common confusion as to the idea of 
abstraction. In one sense it may be said that 
there is no one so concrete in his view of things 
as the child or the savage ; in another sense, it 
may be said that there is no one so abstract. 



96 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

The mind of the child clings to the immediate 
images of things; it cannot rise above their 
pictured presence in space and time ; it cannot 
sever them in thought from their immediate 
surroundings. On the other hand, the child's 
thought is abstract and simple ; it confuses all 
things together ; it scarcely distinguishes at first 
between animate and inanimate, between man 
and animal. With Comte we may call the child 
a Fetichist ; not because his imagination raises 
all things to the level of man, but because he 
still lives in a simplicity or confusion of thought 
for which there are no distinct differences of 
level. On the other hand, as the child advances 
to maturity, the pictures of sense may partially 
fade, but his ideas of things become more com- 
plex and adequate. It ceases to be impossible 
for him to separate objects from the definite cir- 
cumstances of space and time, in which they 
have been at first perceived ; but at the same 
time, his knowledge of those objects, in their 
unity and difference — their permanent nature and 
their manifold phases and aspects — is continually 
growing. If, therefore, the movement of his 
thought, in one point of view, is toward greater 



Development of Religion. 97 

generality and abstractness, in another point of 
view it is toward greater particularity and con- 
creteness. To use a favourite modern phrase, 
the development of human thought is by differen- 
tiation and integration, by induction and deduc- 
tion at once. Now Comte's history of theology 
and metaphysics is greatly distorted by the fact 
that he detects in it only a movement of general- 
ization and abstraction ; and not also a move- 
ment towards greater complexity and complete- 
ness. Yet, even a superficial glance at the de- 
velopment of religion is enough to let us see 
that the Christian idea of God in man is less 
simple and abstract than Jewish Monotheism 
or Oriental Pantheism. If indeed, we were to 
judge of a religion by mere wealth of fantastic 
sensuous symbolism, it might seem possible to 
regard the earliest religions as the richest; though 
even this might be disputed, seeing that the 
fancy of the savage Fetichist, while capricious 
and wayward, is at the same time singularly 
monotonous and uninventive. But to any one 
who would classify religions according to the 
complexity and depth of the thought involved 

in them, it must be apparent that they become 
G 



98 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

more full and definite — not more vague and 
simple — as time advances. Their progress to- 
ward greater universality is at the same time a 
progress toward greater specification. In the 
Indian faith we discern, from very early times, 
the presence of an idea of the divine unity. But 
it is a vague and abstract idea, and for that very 
reason it stands side by side with, or produces, 
a lawless Polytheism, in which there is neither 
method nor meaning ; which, as Goethe says, 
does not subserve the true purposes of a religion, 
since it adds another chaotic element to life, 
instead of supplying a guiding principle through 
all its confusion and difficulty. In the Jewish 
religion we have a true Monotheism, in which 
the unity is no longer that of an abstract sub- 
stance, but of a spiritual or self-conscious being 
— a personal will which manifests itself in a 
definite purpose, in a moral government of men 
and nations. In Christianity, finally, we have 
the idea of a God, who is not merely an absolute 
substance — not merely a Creator and Euler of 
the world, but a self-revealing Spirit ; a Spirit 
who reveals himself in, as well as to, his crea- 
tures — an idea which combines in one the earlier 



Development of Philosophy. 99 

Pantheistic and Monotheistic conceptions. To 
regard the process in which these are three of 
the main stages as merely a process of abstrac- 
tion and negation is surely to take a most ex- 
ternal and superficial view of it. The truth is, 
that this and the similar sketch in Hume's " Dia- 
logues on Natural Eeligion " are rather based on 
a preconceived theory as to the development of 
human thought in religion, than on the phe- 
nomena of religious history. And in Comte's 
" Social Dynamics," he has frequently to mention 
facts which are altogether inconsistent with it, 

Nor is Comte's view of the history of meta- Defect in his 

view of the 

physic less fictitious and inaccurate. According deve , lo P; 

x u o ment uf 

to that view, the earliest philosophies ought to P BS ° P y " 
be the most concrete and complete, and the 
latest, the most simple and abstract ; but the 
very reverse is the fact. It is in the dawn of 
speculation that men are content to explain the 
universe by such abstractions as " being " and 
" becoming." The ancient philosophy contrasts 
with the modern, as simple with complex ; 
fur while the former is occupied with ques- 
tions about "the one" and "the many," the 
" universal " and the " particular," the latter is 



100 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

concerned from the first with the relations 
of self-consciousness to the objective world. 
Again, confining ourselves to modern phil- 
osophy, we find the abstract Universalism (if 
we may use the expression) of Descartes and 
Spinoza, yielding in the next generation to 
two opposite forms of Individualism, and ending 
in the attempt of Kant and his successors " to 
read Locke with the eyes of Leibnitz, and Leib- 
nitz with the eyes of Locke,""* and (we may add) 
to unite the elements of truth in both by a 
deeper view of the principle imperfectly ex- 
pressed in Spinoza. In short, the whole move- 
ment of philosophy is a movement towards a 
more complex, and at the same time towards 
a more systematic, view of the world. Philo- 
sophical thought is ever seeking on the one 
hand to distinguish, and even to oppose to 
each other, the different sides of truth which 
were at first confused together ; and again, on 
the other hand, to show that what were at 
first supposed to be contradictory, are really 
complementary, aspects of things. This ]3rogress 
of philosophy by differentiation and integration 
* Green's Introduction to Hume. 



Development of Science. 101 

Oomte's theory does not explain, but it explains 
him. For, as has been indicated, Comte's whole 
view of the relation of the individual to society, 
and of the present to the past, manifests that 
same effort to concentrate and combine in one 
different and even opposed motives of thought 
which is shown in the idealistic philosophy of 
Germany. Only, as Comte is not conscious of 
this affiliation of his thought, but, on the contrary, 
supposes Positivism to be the simple negation of 
metaphysics, his possession of the higher idea 
shows itself, not in a new metaphysic, but only 
in a better comprehension of the social life and 
development of the race. Hence, also, he sees no 
positive connection between his own specula- 
tions and the previous history of philosophy, 
but connects it solely with the past progress 
of physical science. 

This inadequacy of Comte's view of the his- Defect in 

J- J his view of 

tory of philosophy and theology leads to an£° n ^ elop - 

opposite inadequacy in his view of the history 

of science. As the former is conceived by him 

to be a mere process of abstraction, which ends 

in nothing, so the latter is conceived by him — 

at least, in his first general account of it — purely 



102 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

as a movement from the abstract and general 
to the concrete and particular. There are thus 
two laws for the progress of the human mind — 
the law of its progress to science, and the law 
of its progress in science. The progress to 
science is merely the gradual destruction of 
the imaginative synthesis in which civilization 
began ; the process in science consists in the 
gradual building up of the scientific synthesis 
in which civilization must end. Science begins 
with the consideration of the simplest and most 
abstract relations of things, with arithmetic and 
geometry, and it ends with the investigation of 
their most complex and concrete relations^jwith 
sociology and morals. This, with slight modifica- 
tions, is the historical order of the genesis of the 
sciences, and, what is even more important in 
Comte's eyes, it is the order of their logical de- 
pendence or filiation, and therefore the order of 
a duly arranged scientific education. For each of 
the successive sciences — mathematics, astronomy, 
physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and morals 
— includes a deductive part, in which it depends 
on previous sciences, and an inductive part, in 
which it makes a fresh start from experience 



Mr. Spencer's Criticism. 108 

for itself; and therefore no one can be fully 
equipped for the investigation of the more com- 
plex, who has not made himself master of the 
laws of the simpler, phenomena. Like Plato, 
Comte would write over the portals of science, 
[xr] ayewiueTprjTos eicrirco, and he would add, — 
Let no one enter upon the study of chemistry 
who is not a master of the principles of physics ; 
upon the study of biology, who is not a master 
of the principles of chemistry ; nor upon the 
study of sociology, who is not a master of the 
principles of all the previous sciences. 

This view of the historical and logical filiation Mr. spencer's 

criticism of 

of the sciences has been attacked with consider- that view - 
able force in an Essay by Mr. Spencer upon 
the " Genesis of Science." In that Essay, Mr. 
Spencer points out, what, indeed, Comte himself 
had very fully acknowledged, that Mstoriccdly 
every science in turn has been an instrument 
in the development of the others. Even in the 
time of Aristotle politics and biology had made 
no inconsiderable advance, while as yet physics 
and chemistry could scarcely be said to be in 
existence. And this is only what was to be 
expected, for some knowledge of the conditions 



104 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

of social order is a practical condition of the 
development of any other kind of science ; and 
the necessary art of medicine forced men at a 
very early period to pay some attention to phy- 
siology. Astronomy had to wait for optics to 
furnish it not only with instruments but with 
definite conceptions of the dispersion and refrac- 
tion of light ; and physical investigation could 
not proceed very far without some kind of 
solution of biological and even psychological 
questions in relation to sense perception. It 
was the advance of geometry that led to the 
invention of algebra, and the transcendental 
analysis of Newton and Leibnitz was directly 
suggested by the problems of physics. These 
and many other facts of the same kind seem to 
show that a serial arrangement of the sciences 
misrepresents at once the historical order of 
their development and the logical order of their 
dependence. And in both points of view it 
would be nearer the truth to regard the dif- 
ferent sciences (as Cointe himself sometimes re- 
gards them) as "les diverses branches d'un tronc 
unique." For this " suggests the facts that the 
sciences had a common origin, that they have been 



Littre's Defence of Comte. 105 

developing simultaneously, and that they have 
been from time to time dividing and subdivid- 
ing." Yet even this metaphor is inadequate, for 
" it does not suggest the yet more important fact 
that the divisions and subdivisions thus arising 
do not remain separate, but now and again re- 
unite in direct and indirect ways. They inos- 
culate ; they severally send off and receive 
connecting growths ; and the intercommunion 
has been ever becoming more frequent, more 
intricate, more widely ramified. There has all 
along been higher specialization that there might 
be a larger generalization ; and a deeper analysis 
that there might be a better synthesis. Each 
larger generalization has lifted sundry special- 
izations still higher; and each better synthesis 
has prepared the way for still deeper analysis.""" 

To these objections, Comte would probably -^^0°^ 
have answered,! as Littre has answered for him, tSpencer - 
that there is a difference between the determi- 
nation of some of the laws of a particular class 
of phenomena and the constitution of a science 
of these phenomena ; and that a science cannot 

* Spencer's "Essays," i. p. 145. 

tCf. Pol. Pos. i., Introduction Fondamentale passim. 



106 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

be regarded as constituted till its inductive and 
deductive parts are separated. It cannot be 
denied that physics involves all the relations 
discussed in mathematics, and something more ; 
that chemistry involves all the relations dis- 
cussed in physics, and something more; that 
biology involves all the relations discussed in 
physics and chemistry, and something more ■ 
and that sociology involves the relations dis- 
cussed in all the previous sciences, and something 
more. Now, it is a hopeless task for the weak 
human intellect to deduce this "something more" 
in the more complex, from the principles of the 
less complex sciences, even if absolutely such a 
deduction is possible. Hence we cannot regard 
a science as constituted, until its special subject- 
matter has been separated from the subject-matter 
of the simpler sciences, and until, in relation to 
that subject-matter, certain laws have been de- 
termined which cannot be deduced from the 
principles of those sciences. Thus, in Comte's 
opinion, biology was not constituted as a science 
until, in quite modern times, the phenomena of 
life were seen at onCe in their relative depend- 
ence on, and their relative separation from, 



The Universal and the General. 107 

physical and chemical phenomena. Nor could 
sociology be constituted as a science until, by 
Comte himself, the law of social development 
was determined, and the phenomena of human 
life were thereby separated from phenomena of 
life in general, which fall under the province of 
biology. In this sense, therefore, it is argued 
that the historical and the logical order of the 
sciences are coincident ; and that, while it is 
quite true that the advance of one of the 
simpler sciences is often stimulated by recpaire- 
ments of the more complex sciences, it is equally 
true that the more complex science has to wait 
for the development of the simpler science, ere 
it can rise above its first empirical stage. 

It would be beyond the scope of this volume, Ambiguity 

of the opposi- 

even if it were in the power of the writer, to {jj^J^raai 
discuss in all their bearings these different views particular, 
as to the arrangement of the sciences ; but it 
may be remarked that the most important of Mr. 
Spencer's objections are directed, not against the 
specific account which Comte gives of the his- 
torical and logical relations of the sciences, but 
rather against his assertion that science pro- 
gresses from the general to the particular, from 



108 The Social Philoso r £jhy of Comte. 

the abstract to the concrete. That progress, he 
maintains, is " at once from the special to the 
general, and from the general to the special." 
If arithmetic comes before geometry, and geo- 
metry before physics ; on the other hand it is 
equally true, that geometry comes before algebra, 
and algebra before transcendental analysis, in 
which mathematics reaches its highest general- 
ization. The " special " geometry of the ancients 
is contrasted by Comte himself with the " gen- 
eral" geometry of the moderns, and the New- 
tonian theory of gravitation was more general 
than the laws of Kepler, by the aid of which it 
was discovered. Now, looking at such illustra- 
tions as these by which Mr. Spencer supports 
his case, we cannot but think that the controversy 
really turns upon the ambiguity of " general " or 
" abstract," to which reference has been made ; 
and that in spite of what both Comte and his 
critic have said about the different meanings 
that may be given to these words, neither of 
them has consistently kept in view the difference 
between the " general " with which science be- 
gins, and that with which it ends. In one 
sense of the word, transcendental analysis is 



The Universal as Principle. 10D 

more "general" than arithmetic and algebra, 
but in another sense it is more specific. For 
transcendental analysis includes and explains 
both arithmetic and algebra, and casts its light 
even beyond their sphere ; but it does so, not 
by becoming vaguer and less definite, but quite 
the contrary. It is a universal that does not 
leave out of account the differences of the par- 
ticulars included under it, but rather determines 
them more fully. And the same thing may be said 
of the laws of Newton as contrasted with the 
laws of Kepler. It is easy enough to reach 
the general, if all that is wanted is a common 
element ; for in that case we need only to ab- 
stract from everything but the simple idea of 
" being," and we have at one step reached the 
top of the logical tree of Porphyry, the highest 
universal of thought. But the universal of 
science and philosophy is something different 
from this ; it is not merely a generic name, 
under which things are brought together, but a 
principle which unites them and determines 
their relation to each other. It is a unity, the 
thought of which does not exclude, but rather is 
correlative with, a knowledge of the differences. 



110 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

In this point of view the Platonic view of 
science, as a search for unity and the universal, 
and the Aristotelian view of it as a search for 
difference and the particular, are but opposite 
sides of the shield of knowledge, which cannot 
be separated from each other. Now the defect 
of Comte's general description of the progress of 
science is, that he has chosen to look solely at 
one side of the shield, and to regard it merely 
as a movement of specification ; and the conse- 
quence is, that in the sequel he is obliged 
continually to correct himself, and to observe 
in particular cases that it involves also a move- 
ment of generalization. Mr. Spencer sees both 
sides, and therefore progress is for him a move- 
ment at once of differentiation and integration ; 
yet in his criticism of Comte, and in his " First 
Principles," there are passages in which he 
seems to confuse the universal of science with 
a mere abstraction or logical genus, and to 
overlook the essential correlativity and inter- 
dependence of the two opposite movements of 
thought* The defects of both writers, however, 

* Mr. Spencer, it may be remarked, takes, like Comte, 
a negative view of the progress of religion, and to him, 



Comte's Negations. Ill 

lie mainly on the metaphysical side ; in their 
analysis of the idea of development more than 
in their application of it. And it is the power 
and fertility of resource with which they apply 
it to life and history, which gives them, and 
especially which gives Comte, a claim to an 
important place among modern philosophical 
writers. 

In this chapter I have tried to trace to 
their origin Comte's ideas of social and intel- 
lectual development, and to examine the motives 
winch led him to reject theology and metaphysics, 
as legitimate forms of science. In the following 
chapter I shall go on to consider more carefully 
the subjective synthesis by which he would 
supply their place. 

therefore, the last religion is the worship of the Un- 
known, and, indeed, of the Unknowable. But Comte 
practically retracts this view when he makes the worship 
of Humanity the last form of religion. 



112 The Social Philoso'phy of Comte. _ 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE POSITIVE OK CONSTRUCTIVE SIDE OF COMTE'S 

PHILOSOPHY HIS SUBSTITUTES FOR METAPHYSIC 

AND THEOLOGY. 

His recognition of the need of substitutes for Theology and Meta- 
physic — His assertion that his philosophy is relative and subjec- 
tive — Double meaning of the relativity of knowledge as involving 
the assertion or the denial of real or absolute knowledge — ■ 
Collision of Comte's earlier and later views on this point — 
Comte's subjective synthesis not subjective in the sense of Indi- 
vidualism, nor yet in the sense that a conscious subject is im- 
plied in all objects — His compromise between these opposite 
theories — His doctrine that man sees the world in ordine ad 
hominem but not in ordine ad universum — Impossibility 
of separating nature from man or of criticising the whole 
system to which man belongs — Defects of Comte's religion 
according to his own idea of religion — Schisms in the school of 
Comte. 

In the preceding chapter I have tried to explain 
how Comte was led to treat Metaphysics and 
Theology as merely transitional forms of human 
thought, and to show that this view not only in- 
volves a false conception of their nature, but also 



His View of Development. 113 

necessitates an entire misrepresentation of the 
course of their historical development. To re- 
gard the history of Metaphysics and Theology as 
a purely negative process, by which the first con- 
crete fulness of religious conceptions was gradually 
attenuated till nothing remained but the bare ab- 
stract idea of Nature, and, on the other hand, to 
think of the history of science as the correspond- 
ing positive process, by which the mind of man 
advanced from the general to the special, from 
the investigation of the simplest numerical and 
spatial relations of things to the knowledge of the 
complex social nature of man — this is a view of 
man's intellectual history, recommended by its 
simplicity and clearness, as well as by its corre- 
spondence with the most popular philosophy of 
the present time. But, as we have seen, it in- 
volves a one-sided conception of the movement of 
human thought in its scientific, and still more in 
its theological and metaphysical, aspects. Comte 
himself enables us to see that his first description 
of the history of science is incomplete, if not mis- 
leading; and that its movement is towards greater 
generality as well as towards more definite speci- 
fication. Now, as Metaphysic is only the clearest 

H 



114 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

form of self-consciousness, and as man's conscious- 
ness of himself deepens and widens with his con- 
sciousness of the objective world, we might ex- 
pect to find that Metaphysic also develops at once 
towards the universal and towards the particular; 
and when we look at the facts of the history of 
Philosophy we find this expectation amply realized. 
Nor is it otherwise with religion — which is to the 
heart and the imaginative intuitions of man what 
philosophy is to his self-conscious intelligence ; for 
the latest religion is at once the deepest and the 
richest, the most complex and the most universal. 
Need of sub- We cannot, however, give a completely satis- 

stitutes for 

™id a theo- ic factory answer to Comte's criticism of Metaphysics 
and Theology without considering more fully the 
substitutes which .he would put in their place. 
For Comte is not simply an Agnostic; he does not 
deny the reality of the wants which Metaphysics 
and Theology have hitherto striven to satisfy; nor 
does he hold that these wants are, by the nature 
of things and of the human intelligence, for ever 
precluded from satisfaction. He does not, like 
some modern writers, reduce philosophy into a 
consciousness of the limits of the human mind, 
and relioion into a vasme awe of the Unknowable. 



Need of Philosophy and Religion. 115 

On the contrary, lie holds that Positivism for the 
first time supplies complete satisfaction to all 
the tendencies of the many-sided nature of man, 
whereas all earlier systems had been obliged to 
purchase one kind of culture at the expense of 
another, — -to gratify the affections by the sacrifice 
of intellectual freedom, or to cultivate the intelli- 
gence to the neglect of the claims of the heart. 
To the Metaphysician he grants the necessity of 
a systematizing of knowledge in relation to one 
general principle, which shall furnish at once its 
first presupposition and its end. To the Theo- 
logian he grants that that inner harmony with 
self and with the world, which we call religion, 
can only be secured by a firm belief and trust in 
some " Grand Etre " who transcends and compre- 
hends our narrow individuality, " in whom we 
live, and move, and have our being." But while 
(in opposition to the tendencies of that scientific 
empiricism, to which the name of Positivism is 
usually given) Comte thus recognizes those claims 
of the intelligence and of the heart for which 
Philosophy and Theology had tried to provide, he 
still adopts as his own the empiricist condemnation 
of both, and seeks to show that, on the basis of 



11 G The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

empiricism itself, we may secure the complete 
satisfaction of all our spiritual wants. It is to 
this claim of Comte, to occupy" in the name of 
Science the place from which Theology and Meta- 
physics have been expelled, that we must now 
direct our attention. 
Distinctions The contrast which Comte draws between his 

of subjec- 

jective, d r°ia- own philosophy and religion, and those of his pre- 
absoiute. decessors, is expressed in the words " relative " 

synthesis 

and " subjective." His purpose, he tells us, 
is a " subjective synthesis," while his prede- 
cessors had aimed at an " objective synthesis " 
— i.e., they had endeavoured to comprehend the 
world in itself, by carrying its phenomena back 
to an objective principle to which they are all 
equally related, and of which they are all 
the manifestations ; while he is content to take 
his stand on the subjective unity of the human 
race, a unity which has grown out of the con- 
scious or unconscious co-operation of all past 
generations, and which now manifests itself in 
the love and reverence of men for each other, and 
for the Grand Mre, Humanity, that compre- 
hends them all.*"" For the existence of this 
* I need not do more than refer to Comte's view of 



Relativity of Knowledge. 117 

Great Being is a fact which we can empirically 
verify, although we are totally unable to discover 
the meaning of that wider objective fatality, to 
which ultimately the fortunes and life of man- 
kind are subjected. Again, Comte contrasts his 
own philosophy with that of his predecessors, as 
" relative " with " absolute." By this he means 
that Positivism does not seek to base itself on 
absolute knowledge, i.e., on that knowledge of nou- 
menal causes which was claimed by metaphysic, 
but merely on a knowledge of the laws of phe- 
nomena, and that, therefore, the only centre to 
which our knowledge can be referred and by re- 
ference to which it can be organized is the rela- 
tive centre of Humanity and not the real or abso- 
lute centre of the universe. Comte also often uses 
the word " relative " in a slightly modified sense 
to indicate that his philosophy takes due account 
of all the various conditions under which human- 
ity progresses towards its ideal, and does not seek 
to set up an absolute standard of perfection with- 
out reference to the necessary limitations of each 
stage of development. Now, as it is always best 

Humanity as " incorporating" only its best members with 
itself. Something will be said of this below. 



118 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

to criticize a writer by reference to his own prin- 
ciples and aims, I shall attempt to show that 
the main errors of Comte arise from his being not 
" subjective," not " relative " enough, even in the 
sense which he himself gives to these words. He 
is not " subjective " enough ; for in the develop- 
ment of his theory he admits a kind of separation 
between thought and existence, which a logical 
development of his own principles must have led 
him to reject. And he is not " relative " enough ; 
for he starts from philosophical principles which 
involve the denial of any necessary connection 
between man and the world, and even between 
the different elements in the nature of man, and 
he ends with a religion in which poetry is di- 
vorced from truth, and truth from poetry. 
Ambiguity In the first place, however, it is necessary to 

in the idea 

of relativity, dear up a certain ambiguity as to the idea of 
relativity. It is a commonplace of the sensation- 
alist and empiricist school at the present day, that 
we are confined to the knowledge of phenomena, 
and cannot rise to the knowledge of noumena, or 
things in themselves. Comte usually expresses 
this idea by saying that science is limited to the 
investigation of the laws of phenomena, and that 



Two Views of Relativity. 119 

it was the error of Theology and Metaphysics to 
seek to determine their causes. When, however, 
we try to ascertain the exact force of this opposi- 
tion, we find that it may have two distinct mean- 
ings. For it is one thing to say, that Theology 
and Metaphysics gave false answers to a legiti- 
mate question, which was afterwards more cor- 
rectly answered by science ; and it is quite an- 
other thing to say that they attempted to answer a 
question different from the question of science, 
and which it is beyond the powers of the human 
mind to answer. Now, Comte sometimes speaks 
as if the error of the Theologians were simply 
that they sought to explain all phenomena by re- 
garding them as the expressions of divine wills 
and intelligences analogous to our own ; and as if 

DO / 

the error of the Metaphysicians were simply that 
they repeated this explanation in a more irra- 
tional form, substituting personified abstractions 
for Gods. At other times, he speaks as if the 
error of Theology and Metaphysics were that they 
attempted to determine the real nature of things, 
which can be known by us only in their phe- 
nomena. On the former view, Theology and 
Metaphysics are provisional hypotheses, in rela- 



1 20 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

tion to the objects of experience, which disappear 
when it is discovered, that many of these objects, 
which were at first assumed to be like man, are in 
many ways unlike him. On the latter view, they 
are pretended sciences, which do not relate to the 
phenomenal objects of experience at all, but to 
certain realities, supposed to be beneath or be- 
hind them. When we disentangle these two dif- 
ferent views from each other, we find that they 
do not rest on the same logical basis, and that 
they do not by any means imply each other. 
The former view implies only that our ideas of 
the world are confused and imperfect, and require 
to be continually corrected by fresh thought and 
experience. The latter implies that there are cer- 
tain objects other than phenomena, the existence 
of which we know, but the nature of which we 
gradually discover ourselves to be incapable of de- 
termining. It implies, in fact, that our intelli- 
gence can discern its own limits, or, what is the 
same thing, can know that there is something 
beyond those limits. Now while, with certain 
modifications we might not hesitate to grant the 
truth of the former of these doctrines, we should 
require some proof of the latter, or even of its 



Things in Themselves, 121 

logical possibility. For by it we are brought face 
to face with the difficulty of conceiving how we 
should be able to ask questions, which— not from 
external circumstances, but from the essential na- 
ture of our intelligence — are altogether unanswer- 
able, and which therefore, we can say with cer- 
tainty, we shall never be able to answer. This, 
which Mr. Spencer attempts to prove — by very 
inadecpLiate reasonings as it seems to me — Comte 
assumes without any proof at all. Hence, while 
he pretends to renounce metaphysics, he has com- 
mitted himself to one of the most indefensible of 
all metaphysical positions. For the assertion that 
we know only phenomena, has no meaning except 
in reference to the doctrine that there are, or can 
by us be conceived to be, things in themselves — 
i.e., things unrelated to thought ; and that, while 
we know them to exist, we cannot know what 
they are. Now this dogma is simply the schol- 
astic realism, or what Comte calls metaphysics, 
in its most abstract and irrational form. It is a 
residuum of bad metaphysics, which, by a natural 
nemesis, seems almost invariably to haunt the 
minds of those writers who think they have re- 
nounced metaphysics altogether. 



122 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

idealistic The authority of Kant is often quoted in sup- 

view of the 
relativity of p 0r t f the doctrine of the existence of things in 

knowledge. r ° 

themselves : indeed, it seems to be the doctrine 
which is most generally associated with his name. 
But, in spite of some ambiguities, Kant was pre- 
cisely the writer who, by the general direction 
and tendency of his thought, did most to free 
modern speculation from such an illusion. For 
it was his main aim and purpose to show that 
the determination of objects as such, is possible 
only in relation to the unity of apperception, or, 
in other words, of self-consciousness, and by 
means of certain universal principles of thought 
which he calls the Categories. Kant, indeed, says 
that the objects thus known are merely pheno- 
mena, and that things in themselves are unknow- 
able. But even things in themselves are not, in 
his view, altogether out of relation to conscious- 
ness. They are thinkable, though they are 
not knowable ; we have a consciousness of them 
through the ideas of reason, though they are 
not objects of experience ; and our moral life, 
bringing with it a consciousness of freedom, 
turns the thought of them into a conviction of 
their reality. Further, the later German phil- 



Idealistic View of Relativity. 123 

osophers, who sought to develop the principles 
of Kant to further issues, and to clear away the 
inconsistencies of his first expression and appli- 
cation of them, found it necessary to bridge over 
the gulf, which Kant had left, between faith and 
reason, between nouniena and phenomena. Ac- 
cordingly we find them insisting upon the 
correlation between object and subject, and 
pointing out that, if this correlation be taken 
strictly, it is a false abstraction to speak at all 
of tilings in themselves which are not relative 
to thought, or of a iioumenon which is a mere 
negation of the phenomenal. There can be no 
absolute opposite or negative of that unity of 
thought and being, which is presupposed in all 
knowledge and experience, and even to speak of 
its existence is to use words without meaning. 
As Heine says, " The distinction of objects into 
phenomena and nouniena, i.e., into things that 
for us exist, and things that for us do not exist, 
is an Irish bull in philosophy." Comte some- 
times, especially in the Politique Positive, comes 
near to the perception of this truth, but his full 
apprehension of it is prevented by the presuppo- 
sitions from which he started, and from which he 




124 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

could never completely free himself. Thus, in a 
passage quoted in the previous chapter,* Comte's 
idea seems to be that the images of things — 
individual objects as such — are immediately 
given in sense ; that the mind reacts, in the 
processes of abstraction and generalization, to 
raise perception into knowledge ; and that this 
knowledge, just because of its generality, is sub- 
jective or relative knowledge. Now this seems 
to be only a revival of Locke's view that general 
ideas are necessarily fictitious, because they are 
the " work of the mind." Yet, in the same 
paragraph Comte goes on to speak as if 
the one defect of our knowledge, which 
prevents it from being adequate to reality, were 
that our point of view is not quite universal, 
and that we are incapable of entirely freeing it 

* In Pol. Pos. i. 439, Comte seems to come still nearer 
to the Kantian principle that all existence is existence for 
a conscious self, but (1) he confounds this principle with 
the idea that there is an action and reaction between sub- 
ject and object, which are identified with the organism 
and the environment respectively ; and (2) he does not 
draw the necessary inference that the thing in itself is a 
fiction of abstract thought, or, in other words, that there 
is no meaning whatever in speaking of an existence which 
is not relative to the thinking self. Cf. Pol. Pos. iii., p. 
18 seq. 



Uncertainty of Comte's Language. 125 

from what is subjective. By comparing our 

views with those of other men, we can rise above 
individual and national prejudices, but we cannot 
free our views from those idola tribus, which are 
common to the whole human race, because we 
are unable to establish an)' satisfactory com- 
munication with the animals. Whatever may 
be thought of the last suggestion, the passage at 
least shows a view of the hindrances to knowledge 
which is not consistent with any absolute divi- 
sion between phenomena and noumena. For, if 
man can escape from the necessity of viewing 
things in online ad individuum, i.e., in relation to 
his individual self, he is at least on the way 
towards regarding them in online ad universum. 
This point, however, will be considered below, 
when we come to treat more directly of the 
sense in which Comte's synthesis is " subjective." 
Here we need only call attention to the differ- 
ence of this view from that which is suggested 
by other passages (especially in his exposition of 
the " law of the three stages") in which the know- 
ledge of relations of phenomena is contrasted with 
the knowledge of causes. From such passages we 
should gather that causes belong to an order of 



126 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

reality, which is absolutely hidden from us, and 
to the knowledge of which all our acquaintance 
with phenomena does not enable us to make 
any approximation. 

meiXor Tne truth seems to be fchat the absolute dis- 

itseif, is tinction of phenomena and noumena — resting 

really the 

universal, ag j^ joes on an i rra tional separation between 
thought and being— is tenable only from the 
point of view of a philosophy which regards the 
individual as the. only reality, and the universal 
as a name or an abstraction. From the point of 
view of Individualism, it was natural and even 
necessary for Comte to assail a metaphysic 
which claimed to apprehend a reality beyond 
and beneath the phenomenal individuals and 
their external relations to each other, and which 
found in this reality the vera causa of all pheno- 
menal existence. It was natural for him to 
maintain that such reality is unknowable for 
us, and that the general terms which seem to 
express it are mere collective names for indi- 
viduals, or, at best, abstract ideas of elements 
common to many individuals. 

and, there- But when Comte had so far changed his point of 

fore, can be ox 

known. v i ew as to hold that " man is a mere abstraction, 



Causes and Laws. 127 

and that there is nothing real but humanity," he 
had lost the right to use such language. He 
had seen that the individual is an abstraction, 
and he was even in danger of forgetting that 
the mere universal is an abstraction also. Now 
modern metaphysic, by showing the relativity of 
objects to a thinking subject, has banished the 
idea of real entities, or things in themselves, 
lying behind and beyond the phenomena ; and, at 
the same time and by the same process of rea- 
soning, it has proved that the individual can- 
not be separated from the universal, any more 
than the universal can be separated from the 
individual. In other words, it has proved that 
the world cannot be conceived in the spirit 
of abstract nominalism as a collection of in- 
dividual objects and events, related merely as 
similar or dissimilar, or co-existent or successive, 
any more than it can be conceived in the spirit 
of scholastic realism, as a mere phenomenal 
appearance of certain noumenal substances, which 
correspond to general terms. From this point 
of view, the universal is at once a law and 
a cause ; for it is a principle of unity, which 
manifests itself in the differences of particulars, 



128 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

and through their relations binds them into one 
individual whole. If Comte had realized the 
meaning of the categories by which he was 
really guided, he must have altered his 
whole conception of the relation of metaphysic 
to positive science. For it was his own best 
achievement to apply this idea of the unity of 
the universal and particular to one great depart- 
ment of science. It was to show that society, 
whether in the form of the family, of the nation, 
or of humanity, is not merely a collection of 
similar individuals, but a unity of organically 
related members ; and that its development is 
not merely a succession of events, but the evolu- 
tion of one life which remains identical with 
itself through all its changes. And in this he 
was not refuting metaphysic, but following di- 
rectly in the course of the great metaphysicians 
of the preceding generation. It might, indeed, 
be shown, that none of the greatest names in 
philosophy — not Plato or Aristotle, not Spinoza 
or Leibnitz — was, strictly speaking, either a 
scholastic realist or a scholastic nominalist, 
though in all before Kant there were tendencies 
to one or other of these extremes. But the 



The Subjective Synthesis. 120 

idealistic movement that took its origin with 
K an t — and which Comte should have criticized, 
if his criticism on metaphysic was to be, accord- 
ing to his own frequent phrase, " on the level ol 
his age " — had set before itself as its distinctive 
purpose and aim, to transcend this opposition. 
In that philosophy Comte would have found 
just what he wanted — a way of asserting the 
reality of the universal, which should not involve 
the denial of the reality of the individual. For 
want of this principle, the end of his system 
conies into contradiction with its beginning. For 
while Comte begins with a vehement denial 
of the universal as existent in itself, — a denial 
which is expressed in the individualistic lan- 
guage of the school of Locke, — he ends with an 
equally vehement assertion of the social uni- 
versal against the individualism of Rousseau. 
And his "subjective synthesis," even its latest 
form, is embarrassed by hesitations and incon- 
sistencies, which are due mainly to his inability 
to shake himself free from that implicit nom- 
inalism with which he had started. 

It is to this last point that we must now His subjj£; 

sis is not 

direct our attention. What does Comte mean sensational- 



130 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

by saying that the ultimate synthesis of know- 
ledge is " not objective but subjective " ? If we 
took the words in their most natural meaning, 
we should be led to suppose that Comte held 
that theory of subjective individualism, which 
was the logical result of Berkeley's so-called 
idealism, and the basis of the scepticism of 
Hume. Among later writers this theory has 
been most fully expressed in some of the works 
of J. S. Mill, and it is still offered by Mr. 
Spencer and Professor Huxley as one of the two 
alternative theories (the other being materialism) 
between which philosophy must for ever fluctu- 
ate. According to this view, the individual 
directly knows nothing except the states of his 
own subjectivity ; or, if he seems to know any- 
thing else, it is through a process of association, 
the result of which can never be verified, seeing 
that no one can go beyond the bounds of his 
own consciousness. Now it is obvious that, if 
this be the truth, " the subjective " and " the 
individual " go together and imply each other ; 
for, if we cannot transcend our own individuality, 
so as to apprehend other things, or come into 
communication with other beings, then we must 



Tlte Subjective which is Objective. 131 

live a purely subjective life. And if, on the 
other hand, it can be shown that we know other 
tilings and beings as directly and immediately 
as we know ourselves, then our subjectivity is 
no longer a limit to us, but a "subjective 
synthesis " may be at the same time " objective." 
Now, it was one of the principal results of the 
German idealism to show that this latter view 
was the true one, and that thought is not merely 
a state of the individual subject as such. To 
speak of the consciousness of the individual as 
limited to the apprehension of his subjective states, 
is, indeed the reverse of the truth ; for jhe co n- 
sciousness of self implies the conscious ness of the 
not-self, and grows with it, and by moans of it. 
Wo are " a part of all that jye have kn own.'Land 
all that we have known is a part of us. Our life 
widens with our world, and is indeed the same 
thing from an opposite point of view. When we 
realize this correlativity of subject and object 
in knowledge, we can no longer contemplate a 
thinking being as merely one individual among 
the other individuals of the world. We are 
forced to recognize that the consciousness of self 
lifts him to a universal or central point of view, 



\ 



132 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

— a point of view which is central, not merely 
in relation to his own feelings and states, bnt 
central also in relation to the objective world. 
The being who knows himself as an individual 
is, for that very reason, not merely individual ; 
he can know a reality, which is not merely that 
of his own subjective states or sensations, and 
he can identify himself with an end, which is not 
merely his own expected pleasure. The possi- 
bility of an intellectual life for us, indeed, lies 
just in this, that we can regard — nay, that to 
a certain extent we cannot but regard — our own 
individuality from an " objective " point of view, 
— a point of view in which it has no more 
importance than other individualities ; or in 
which, at least, all its importance is derived from 
its relation to the whole of which it is a part. 
And the poet who said, — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man ! " 

had truly discerned that moral life also is 
dependent on the transformation of man's in- 
dividuality by this universal consciousness with 
which it is linked and bound up. 



The Subjectivity of Man. 133 

Now this view of self-consciousness, as objective Nor yet is it 

idealism. 

in spite of its subjectivity, universal in spite of its 
individuality, necessarily leads to a conception of 
man, not merely as one of the many existences 
in the manifold universe, but as the. existence in 
which all the others are summed up, and through 
which they are to be explained. On one side of 
his being, indeed, we must regard him as a "part 
of this partial world,"* and, in this point of 
view, we can understand his life only in relation 
to the other things and beings which limit him 
on every side. Nay, as he is the most complex 
and dependent of existences, we can only rise to 
a satisfactory knowledge of him, after we have 
laid a basis for this knowledge, in the study 
of the simpler phenomena of the organic and 
inorganic world. But, on the other hand, the 
possibility of all this objective science — of the 
knowledge by man of that which is not man — lies 
in this, that he is not merely part of the whole, — 
not merely the most complex existence in the 
world, — but that the universal principle, the prin- 
ciple which gives unity to the world, manifests 
itself in him. It is because, as has been said, 
* Cf. Green's Introduction to Hume's Works, § 152. 



134 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

" Nature becomes conscious of itself in man," 
that man in his turn can read the open secret 
\ of Nature. In spelling out the meaning of 
nature and history, he is taking the true way, 
and indeed the only way, to the knowledge of 
himself; but this knowledge would be to him 
impossible, if the self-consciousness that makes 
him man were not also the principle of unity 
in the objective world. Comte himself has an 
obscure perception of this truth when he says 
vthat, " strictly speaking there is no phenomenon 
within our experience which is not in the truest 
sense human ; and that, not merely because it is 

man that takes cognizance of it, but also because, 

.... 
from a purely objective point of view, man sums 

up in himself all the laws of the world, as the 
ancients truly felt." * If Comte had only brought 
together the subjective and the objective unity — 
the unity of knowledge, and the unity of exist- 
ence — both of which he here finds in man, and 
if he had recognized the necessary relation of 
the two, he would have reproduced the highest 
lesson of /German idealism. For that lesson is 
that the subjective unity, the unity of self- 
*Pol. PosOvJ.81; Transl. 161. 



Microcosm and Macrocosm. 135 

consciousness, which is presupposed in all know- 
ledge or experience of the world, must at the 
same time be regarded as the objective principle 
of its existence. The macrocosm, to use an 
ancient conception, of which Comte somewhere 
speaks with approval, can be comprehensible 
only to the microcosm, which finds in the great- 
world the means of understanding itself, just l 
because in another way it has in itself the 
key for the understanding of the world. Man 
can know that which is not himself, because 
from another point of view there is nothing in 
which he does not, or may not, find himself^ 

It follows from this that the last science, the For idealism 

does not 

science of man, in so far as it is also the ^SSS 

, ., to the 

science of mind, cannot merely be built upon objective. 
and added to the physical and natural sciences, 
but must react upon them and transform them. 
For, though the knowledge of man presupposes 
the knowledge of nature, yet, on the other hand, 
the knowledge of nature which we get, when we 
abstract from it its relation to man, is imperfect 
and incomplete. The true idea of nature cannot 
be attained except when it is viewed in relation 
to that being who is at once its culmination and 



136 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

its explanation. Or, to put this in another point 
of view, the intelligence which appears in man is 
presupposed in every object of the intelligible 
world. Self-consciousness is not, therefore, an 
episodic appearance in a world, which is unpre- 
pared for it, and which might exist, or be under- 
stood, without it. It is the revelation of the 
meaning; of all that went before. What Dr. 
Tyndall has stated not long since as the modern 
view of Materialism, that matter contains in 
itself " the promise and the potency" of life and 
even of mind, may be willingly accepted as an 
expression of their own doctrine by Idealists ; 
for the converse of this proposition is, that mind 
is the " realization," and therefore the only key 
to the ultimate nature, of matter. Hence all 
the sciences which treat of the mathematical, 
physical, chemical, and vital relations of things, 
must be regarded as hypothetical and based 
upon abstraction ; for thought, spirit, mind, is 
implied in all such relations, nor can a complete 
or adequate conception of them be attained, 
until we have regarded the self-consciousness 
that makes us men as, in this point of view, 
not only the last, but also the first, not merely 



Idealistic Tendencies in Comte. 137 



the end, but also the beginning of nature. In 
this sense the analytic separation of the sciences 
from each other and from thought must be modi- 
fied and corrected in a final synthesis, which will 



indeed be " subjective," in so far as it brings into 
view the unity of the subject presupposed in 
all knowledge. But to one who has understood 
the full meaning of the process, this " subjective 
synthesis " will also be objective ; and, indeed, 
it alone will be able to vindicate, while it 
explains, the limited objectivity of the other 
sciences. 

No w__it is Comte's merit that he altogether He ends, 

therefore, in 

repudiates that false subjective synthesis, which na < [° i r :ipro ' 
was the natural result of the principles of Locke 
and Berkeley. Rejecting the doctrine that what 
we know immediately is only the states of our own 
consciousness, he takes his stand at an objective 
point of view, and arranges the sciences in an 
objective order, which begins with the inorganic 
world, and ends with man as the most complex 
of all existences. On the other hand, it is also 
his merit that he sees the necessity of that 
true " subjective synthesis " which arises from 
the reaction of the last science, the science of 



i 



138 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

man, upon those that went before it ; or, in other 
words, from the perception that man is not 
merely the end, but also in a sense the begin- 
ning of nature. But this ultimate correction 
and re-organization of science from a subjective 
point of view appears in Comte in a distorted 
and imperfect form, in a form that leaves " sub- 
jective " and " objective " synthesis still opposed 
to each other, or only gives room for an artificial 
or external reconciliation between them. For 
Comte (in spite of all he says of relativity) does 
not clearly recognize the subjectivity implied in 
our first objective knowledge of the world;* 
and, hence, when he introduces the subjective 
side of that knowledge, he seems to be starting 
from a new and independent point of view, and 
not simply to be bringing into clear consciousness 
what was presupposed in the previous movement 
of thought. In other words, the subjective syn- 
thesis of Comte does not arise from a perception 
that the subjectivity of men is universal, and 
therefore objective. On the contrary, he denies 
the possibility of discovering any principle of 
unity in the objective world, and maintains that 
* Pol. Pos. i. 420. 



The Subjective Principle. 139 

the objective sciences, when left to themselves, 
tend towards the " divagations indefinies " of a 
wayward and lawless curiosity. Hence the 
principle of unity, which is necessary to bring 
order and system into our knowledge, must he 
imported into these sciences from without. On 
this view, we can organize knowledge only in 
reference to a subjective principle supplied by 
the altruistic affections, — affections which bind 
men together so as to make all humanity 
through all space and time into one great 
organism, and which thus supply a definite end 
and aim to all the intellectual, as well as to 
all the active, energies of the individual. This 
subjective principle, in Comte's view, has been the 
unconscious stimulus of all the efforts of the 
social and intellectual leaders of men in the past; 
it has been the source of all that organized co- 
operation of families and nations on which 
man's physical and moral progress has depended. 
Positivism has only to make it into the direct 
aim and conscious purpose of human endeavour, 
and thereby to check that vain and wasteful 
application of man's limited powers, which has 
prevailed in the past, especially during the 



140 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

revolutionary period of transition, now coming 
to an end. Hence Comte condemns, not only the 
metaphysicians, who search into things altogether 
out of the reach of man, but also the scientific 
men, who seek to extend the knowledge of their 
special subjects indefinitely in every direction, 
suggested by an empty curiosity, without regard 
to the practical end of all science. The Mathe- 
matician, who wastes himself in the discovery of 
forms and methods which have no relation to the 
requirements of physics; the Biologist, who specu- 
lates on the origin of species, forgetting how little 
light such inquiries can throw on the develop- 
ment of man ; even the Sociologist, who pursues 
remote investigations into the history of climate 
and race, " before such studies are made neces- 
sary by the practical difficulty of extending the 
civilization of the West, regenerated by Positiv- 
ism, to the populations that are less advanced 
in civilization " — are all brought under the 
Comtist anathema, as guilty of wasting the small 
powers of man on questions which are not imme- 
diately necessary or useful. " The public and 
its teachers should always refuse to recognize 
investigations which do not tend either to deter- 



Knowledge not an End in Itself. 141 

mine more precisely the material and physical 
laws of man's existence, to throw greater light 
on the modifications which these laws admit, or 
at least to render the general method of investi- 
gation more perfect," " It is necessary that the 
sciences should in the first instance be studied 
independently; but this study should in each 
case be carried only so far as is necessary to 
enable the intellect to take a solid grasp of the 
science next above it in the scale, and thus to 
rise to the systematic study of Humanity, its 
.inly permanent field."* On this principle, the 
priests of Positivism are not to be specialists ; nor, 
indeed, are any of them to devote their lives to 
scientific investigation alone ; except, it may be, a 
few distorted and unbalanced natures, in whom an 
abnormal tendency to intellectual pursuits has 
stunted the growth of the moral sympathies. To 
make scientific men renounce the intellectual life 
as an end in itself, and to direct all their energies 
to the solution of those problems which seem to 
have most immediate relation to the improve- 
ment of man's estate, is one of the main objects 
which Comte has in view in restoring the spiritual 
* Pol. Pos. i. 370, 383. 



142 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

power. A free development of each science for 
itself apart from the rest, and a free develop- 
ment of science as a whole, without reference to 
action for ends determined by social sympathy, 
are equally opposed to the Comtian ideal. The 
world and all objects in it are to be regarded 
by the Positivist merely as means, which we 
seek to know not for themselves, but only in 
order that we may use them for a predetermined 
end. For, according to Comte, the energies of 
the intelligence run to waste except when they 
are directed by an esprit d'ensemble, and the only 
totality, with reference to which such systematic 
direction is possible, is the " subjective " totality 
of humanity, 
comte I have already indicated to some extent the 

admits a 

principle in grounds on which I would criticize this theory 

man which ° ^ 

indi'viduai! 5 of " subjective synthesis." It implies, for one 
thing, that there is no natural convergence of 
the sciences, due to the unity of the parts of 
the intelligible world with each other and with 
the intelligence ; but that the synthesis of know- 
ledge is artificial, and forced upon it from with- 
out. Man, in Comte's point of view, is not a 
microcosm, who finds himself again in the macro- 



The Social Point of Vieiv. 143 

cosm. He is like a stranger in a foreign country, 

who seeks to arm himself with such fragments 

of knowledge about it as are necessary for his 

protection and his own private ends. Yet this 

statement, without qualification, would not he 

altogether just to Comte ; for, in his view, the 

individual man does find himself in the presence 

of one " object," which is also " subjective," — 

of one Great Being, whom he has not to treat 

as an external means to ends of his own, but 

rather in whom he has to find his own end. 

The synthesis of knowledge, therefore, is not 

subjective so far as Sociology and Morals are 

concerned, whatever it may be in regard to the 

other sciences. The unity, in reference to which 

knowledge is to be organized, is not merely the 

unity of man's nature as an individual, but rather 

as a " collective " being (a bad adjective surely 

to apply to mankind, when they are regarded 

as " members one of another "). Comte thus 

repeats the " homo mensura " in the sense that 

Humanity is for each man the measure of all 

* The distinction made in the Politique Positive be- 
tween Sociology and Morals, depending as it does on 
the opposition of the intellect to the heart, will be dis- 
cussed afterwards. 



144 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

things (though things in themselves escape all our 
measuring). We can transcend ourselves so far 
as to take the point of view of humanity, though 
not so far as to take the point of view of the 
objective unity of the world. Nay, it may even 
be said that we must so transcend ourselves, for 
Comte denies that the individual can separate 
himself from his race, except by a forced and 
illegitimate abstraction. " Man, as an indivi- 
dual," he declares, " cannot properly be said 
to exist except in the too abstract brain of 
modern metaphysicians ;" and the same principle 
on its ethical side leads him to condemn the 
doctrine of absolute personal rights, and to say 
that " individuals should be regarded not as so 
many distinct beings, but as organs of the one 
Great Being." According to these principles it 
would be impossible for us either to know our- 
selves as men, or to live a life in accordance 
with our nature, if we were confined within 
the limits of a purely individual conscious- 
ness. Our consciousness of ourselves is essen- 
tially social, and the individualistic point of 
view is the result of a false abstraction, which 
can never be more than a partial abstraction. 



Man and Nature. 145 

For, strive as we will, we cannot in thought, 
any more than in reality, isolate the individual 
from society, without at the same time taking 
from him all that characterizes him even as an 
individual. To speak, therefore, of knowing man, 
except as a member of the family, of the nation, 
of the race, is irrational. The science of man 
would be impossible if we were not able to get 
beyond our individuality, and to look at it, as 
well as at all other individualities, from the point 
of view of humanity. 

To such a conception of the essentially social Yet t s not 

a universal 

nature of man few, at the present day, would principle, 
object. But a "metaphysician" might wish to 
carry it a little farther, and to recognize not only 
the essential relation of man to man, but also the 
essential relation of man to the universe. If it is 
a fiction of abstraction to separate the individual 
from society, is it a less fiction to isolate him from 
the world in which he lives, and in relation to 
which all his powers and tendencies have been 
developed? Can we really apply the idea of 
i organic unity to the life of man without extending 
it so as in some sense to include also the environ- 
ment in which that life develops ? To ask what 

K 



146 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

man would have been in a different world is surely 
as absurd a question as to ask what he would have 
been had he not lived with his fellow-men. If 
it be allowed and asserted that the objective 
or universal point of view is possible, or even 
necessary, in relation to humanity, there seems 
to be no good ground for denying that it is 
possible and necessary in relation to the uni- 
verse. Once admit that the individual can, 
and even must, so transcend his own indi- 
viduality as to regard himself as part of a 
greater whole and to measure his actions by 
another standard than his own pleasures and 
pains, and you are no longer free to reject 
the possibility of an objective synthesis. If 
the relativity of man to man makes it impossible 
to know him except from the point of view of 
humanity, the relativity of man to the world 
makes it impossible to know humanity except 
from the point of view of the unity of the 
whole. To stop short at the universal of 
humanity is a mere compromise, which, like 
many compromises, is less rational than either 
of the extremes between which it stands. All 
knowledge implies the universality of thought, 



The Universality of Thought. 147 

■i.e., it implies that man, as a thinking being, 
can, and indeed must, apprehend the world from 
a subjective, which is also an objective point, 
of view. For man's consciousness of himself is 
at the same time a consciousness of the not-self, 
and of the unity to which both these correlative 
elements belong. From the dawning of self-con- 
sciousness he is thus lifted above his own separate 
and partial existence as an individual ; he lives a 
life which is not merely his own life, but the life 
of the world. He is, and can become more and 
more completely, the organ of that universal 
spirit which transcends and includes all things, 
which 

" Lives through all life, extends to all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent." 

It is this that makes him capable of science, 
or morality, or religion ; for in so far as he 
speaks his own words, or does his own deeds, 
or thinks his own thoughts, he speaks and acts 
and thinks folly and evil ; and it is only in 
so far as he becomes the instrument of some 
universal power or interest, that his individual 
action, or thought, or utterance can have any 
dignity or value. It shows an imperfect appre- 



148 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

hension of this truth to say with Comte that 
Humanity and not God is the universal power 
in whose service the individual is to find spiri- 
tual freedom ; and that, therefore, the ultimate 
synthesis must be subjective and not objective. 
For the only philosophical difficulty is to con- 
ceive how man can transcend his individual 
subjectivity at all ; and, if that is shown to be 
for him possible, and even necessary, there is 
no reason whatever to deny that he can and 
must rise to the knowledge of God, the absolute 
or objective unity of the world, 
comte's Comte, however, is hindered from recognizing 

changing 

relatione? tn ^ s truth by another class of considerations. 

man. In opposition to that external optimistic tele- 

ology, which was so common at the end of last 
century, and at which the Encyclopedists aimed 
so many blows, he was led in his Philosophic 
Positive to dwell upon the fact that, from the 
point of view of human happiness, the arrange- 
ments of the universe, astronomical, physical, 
and biological, are anything but perfect. Poetry, 
indeed, may be allowed to imagine that the 
powers of nature are the friends of man ; but 
Science, according to Comte, must recognize that 



A Beneficent Necessity. 140 

the world in which man's lot is cast is far 
from furnishing the best conceivable sphere for 
his existence and development ; and that it has 
only become so favourable to his progress as it 
at present is, by the long " providential action " 
of man himself. At this point, however, there 
is a crossing of opposite lines of thought in 
Comte's philosophy. For it is one of the 
leading conceptions of the Politique Positive that 
the influence of an external limiting fatality, 
which forces upon man the surrender of his 
natural self-will, was the necessary condition of 
the development of all his higher powers of 
intelligence and heart. Comte is never weary 
of showing that the growing preponderance of 
the altruistic affections, which alone can give 
unity to human life, is dependent upon the 
existence of those limits which are put upon 
the desires of man by the external world. 
" Without this continual ascendant," he declares, 
" man's feelings would become vague, his intelli- 
gence wanton, and his activity sterile. If this 
yoke were taken away, the problem of human 
life would remain insoluble, since altruism could 
never conquer egoism. But assisted by the 



150 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

supreme fatality, universal love is able habitu- 
ally to secure that personality should be sub- 
ordinated to sociality. The sophisms of human 
pride cannot hinder the positive spirit from 
recognizing that all revolt springs from egoistic 
impulses. A forced submission tends indirectly 
to make altruism prevail by the very fact that 
it represses egoism. But this moral reaction is 
supremely efficacious when obedience becomes 
voluntary, because then sympathy is directly de- 
veloped, and no jarring emotion any longer hinders 
us from getting the benefit of our subjection."* 
From this point of view the external fatality can 
no longer be called unfriendly, or even indifferent 
to man ; or rather its immediate appearance as 
his enemy is the condition of its being, in a 
higher sense, his friend. Kant, in his short 
treatise on history (with which Comte was ac- 
quainted, and which probably had no little 
influence upon the Politique Positive), applies a 
similar thought to the struggle and competition of 
mankind with each other. The very selfish rivalry 
of men, he contends, is in the long run the means 

*Synthese Subjective, p. 16; cf. Pol. Pos. i., p. 414, 
seq. and above, p. 36. 



Good out of Evil. 151 

of developing a higher sociality than could have 
existed among a race of beings with whom per- 
sonal feeling was at first less intense. Egoism 
itself becomes the means of elevating men above 
egoism. Thus in both cases, conditions which, 
in the first instance, seemed to be hostile to 
the intellectual, and still more to the moral, 
development of man, become, because of the 
inner reaction which they call forth in his 
nature, the best means to that development. 
" Out of the eater comes forth meat ; out of the 
strong sweetness." On such a view it seems a 
fair criticism to make that it looks very like a 
proof that those things which seem in the first 
instance to be evils, and which, indeed, taken by 
themselves, arc evils, are the necessary, though neg- 
ative, conditions of higher good. But a negative 
condition is still a condition, and the gods are 
not envious because they refuse man a lower 
good in order to make him seek one which is 
higher. No conclusion unfavourable to Optim- 
ism, in any high sense of the word, can be 
founded on the fact that the world is not 
arranged for the immediate happiness of man, 
if that immediate happiness would have been 



152 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

purchased by his moral degradation ; or even if 
it would have been less powerful to call forth 
the higher energies of his nature. If the 
noblest love is a transmuted and transcended 
egoism, then even an infinite benevolence would 
not seek directly to stop the unlovely and selfish 
struggle which darkens and poisons the life of 
man on earth. The best kind of optimism — 
the optimism, if we may so term it, of the 
deepest and tenderest spirits who have called 
themselves Christian — has not been based upon 
a shallow and imperfect view of the misery, 
still less of the moral evil, of man's life. Bather 
it has been attained through the clearest per- 
ception of both. It has been an Optimism that 
" descended into the grave " of human happiness, 
and even, if we might so interpret the creed of 
Christendom, into the " hell " of human guilt, 
that it might rise again " leading captivity 
captive." ' And Comte, who in his primary 
opposition to theology and metaphysics, had 
rejected all absolute or theological conceptions 
of the world, is led by the natural development 
of his thought to find a higher design in the 
* Cf. Von Hartmann's Selbst-zersetzung des Christenthums. 



Optimism Rational — In what Sense? 153 

immediate negation of design, and to extend to 
the universe that idea of unity which in the 
first instance he had applied only to humanity. 
But, as he could never quite forget the nega- 
tions with which he had started, his recognition 
of this unity was imperfect, and he was ulti- 
mately forced to cast upon poetry the office for 
which science seemed to be inadequate. 

The truth to which these inconsistencies of The irra- 
tionality of 

Comte point, is, that all criticism of the whole ggJSS?" 
system of things to which we belong is, from 
a truly " relative " point of view, irrational. For 
the critic, and the standard by which he criti- 
cizes, cannot be separated from that system. 
To criticize things as particulars is not unreason- 
able, because we can test the particulars by the 
universal ; but to criticize the general system of 
which they and we are parts, and by which our 
development — and of course among other things, 
the development of our moral standard — is made 
possible, is to stand on our own heads and to 
leap off our own shadow. If, indeed, we could 
assume an individualistic point of view, if we 
could isolate ourselves at once from the world 
which is our only sphere of activity, and from 



154 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the social life of the race which is the source of 
all our culture, we might then take the pleasures 
and pains, the feelings that belong to us as 
sensitive individuals, as a standard by which to 
criticize the world. But in any other point of 
view, criticism is possible only as a reference of 
the individual to the universal, of the part to the 
whole, of the various elements and phases of the 
system of things to the idea, which forms the 
unity of that system and the principle of its 
development. It has often been pointed out that 
a logical scepticism cannot be universal, for every 
intelligible view of things implies an ultimate 
unity of thought and of existence, of the esse and 
the intelligi. Doubt must rest on a basis of certi- 
tude, or it will destroy itself. But it is not less 
true, though it is less frequently noticed, that 
all criticism of the world, while it detects 
evil in particular, implies an ultimate optimism. 
For, if such criticism pretends to be more than 
the utterance of the tastes and wishes of an 
individual, it must claim to be the expression 
of an objective principle — a principle which, 
in spite of all appearances to the contrary, is 
realizing itself in the world. If, as Hegel said, 



Subjective Criticism of Life. 155 

the " history of the world is the judgment of the 
world," then, conversely, every true moral judg- 
ment is an anticipation of history: it is a discovery 
of the hidden forces that are already working 
out their triumph in the world, even by means 
of that which seems most to oppose them : it is a 
prophetic sympathy with the "spirit of the years 
to come," which is " yearning to mix itself with 
life." It is this objective character which often 
makes tire words of genius carry with them such 
weight and power. " He spake as one having 
authority and not as the scribes," could be truly 
said only of one, whose speech was like some 
natural force in its independence of merely indi- 
vidual and of temporary influences. On the other 
hand, it is the limited and subjective character 
of many of the ordinary moral judgments of men 
— of much of their fault-finding with the condi- 
tions of existence, the defects of their neighbours, 
and the errors and evils of the time — which 
makes us treat such judgments with indifference. 
We feel that they are in great part the expression 
of personal likes and dislikes, though clothing 
themselves in the lion's skin of a moral censor- 
ship ; and that the only answer which they de- 



156 The Social Philosophy oj Comte. 

serve is, that " there is no disputing about tastes." 
Much of the superficial pessimism of our day is 
the offspring, not of deep sympathy with the real 
evils of humanity, but of a weakness of moral 
fibre, which might tempt us to cut the knot of 
difficulty with the apparently unfeeling words of 
St. Paul, " Shall the thing formed say to him who 
has formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ? " 
But there is another moral judgment than this, 
which is not the mere expression of the tastes 
and wishes of individuals, but of the inner law 
and the necessity of things, or in other words of 
the universal spirit of man, which in the long 
struggle of development is becoming more and 
more clearly conscious of itself and of the law of 
the world. It is only as the organ of this spirit 
that the individual can claim to "judge the world"; 
nor can he make that claim without taking up 
the ground of a philosophical optimism, and 
acknowledging that the " soul of the world is 
just." For the sentiment or idea of good implied 
in such judgment, must either be the last result of 
the development of man in the world — in which 
case the system of things which conditioned the 
result cannot be criticized by it ; or it must be 



Objective Criticism of Life. 157 

the pure utterance of individual feeling, in which 
case it has no objective value whatever. To sup- 
pose with Comte that it is objective, as being 
something which belongs not to the individual 
but to the race, yet subjective, as being something 
that belongs to human nature and not to the na- 
t ure of things in general, is a hopeless attempt to 
combine in one two inconsistent points of view — 
the point of view of the philosophy of Locke, by 
which the^individual consciousness is conceived as 
confined to the apprehension of its own states, 
and the point of view of modern idealism, accord- 
ing to which the consciousness of the thinking 
subject, as such, is universal and objective. 

At this point it may be useful to look back summary of 

Comte's iu- 

and to sum up the various contradictions, or let consistencies 
us rather say, the various forms of the same con- 
tradiction, which appear and reappear in different 
parts of the system of Comte. Beginning with 
the rejection of metaphysics, because it treats 
universals as real entities, and with the in- 
dividualistic definition of science as having to 
determine only the successions and resemblances 
of phenomena, Comte soon has to point out that 
in sociology and even in biology we have to 



158 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

deal with existences whose parts and successive 
phases are indefinable, except in and through 
the whole to which they belong. Beginning 
with objective science, and thus unconsciously 
assuming that the subjectivity of thought is 
not inconsistent with the knowledge of objects as 
such, he ends by asserting that only a " subjective 
synthesis " is possible. Yet this subjective syn- 
thesis is itself objective, for its point of view is 
determined, not by the sensations and feelings of 
the individual subject as such, but by the idea of 
humanity as a corporate unity. Thus the oppos- 
ition between subject and object reduces itself 
to a dualism between the world and man. Hence, 
in place of the worship of God, the absolute 
unity to which all thought and existence are 
referred, Comte would substitute the worship of 
Humanity, " the real author of the benefits for 
which thanks were formerly given to God." 
Finally, even this dualistic view of the world is 
practically withdrawn. For the negative relation 
of the external fatality to man's immediate wishes, 
is proved to be instrumental to his ultimate attain- 
ment of a still higher good. And, as if this were 
not enough, poetry is called in to give complete- 



The Idea of Religion. 159 

ness to the synthetic view of the world, and to 
reconcile the two independent sentiments which 
must combine in order to produce a religion, sub- 
mission and love. For, although Comte at first 
thinks it sufficient to say that the necessity of 
nature is mediated to us by Humanity, yet in 
the end he feels that there will be an essential 
imperfection in his religious system, if it cannot 
identify the ultimate fatality to which we must 
submit with the Great Being whom we are to 
love and serve. On this point a few additional 
remarks may be useful. 

Comte defines religion (and we cannot but ac- Defocts of 

knowledge the substantial truth of the definition) gi<>n accord- 
ing to Iris own 

as the concentration of the three altruistic affec- lde;L " f lt- 
tions — of Eeverence towards that which is above 
us, Love towards that which helps and sustains us, 
and Benevolence towards that which needs our aid. 
It is impossible to give the highest unity to the 
inward and outward life of man, except by devo- 
tion to a Being in relation to whom these three 
affections are identified. Nor can it be denied that 
a faith, which has more or less perfectly fulfilled 
these conditions, has been the mainspring of hu- 
man life in all those periods of history in which 



160 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

man has shown the highest powers of his spirit. 
" The deepest, nay, the one theme of the world's 
history," says Goethe, " to which all others are 
subordinate, is the conflict of faith and unbelief. 
The epochs in which faith, in whatever form it 
may be, prevails, are the marked epochs of 
human history, full of heart-stirring memories, 
and of substantial gains for all after-times. On 
the other hand, the epochs in which unbelief, in 
whatever form it may be, gains its unhappy 
victories, even when for the moment they put 
on a semblance of glory and success, inevitably 
sink into insignificance in the eyes of a posterity 
which will not waste its thoughts on things 
barren and unfruitful." The tenderest harmo- 
nies of affection, the highest achievements of 
passionate energy, the deepest glances of insight 
into men and things, the greatest powers of 
inspired utterance, cannot be reached except 
by minds which are consciously at one with 
themselves and with the law of the universe ; and 
this oneness is what we call a religion. Man can 
do his best work only when he feels that he is 
the organ or instrument of a power or spirit 
which is universal, and therefore irresistible; which 



The Religion of Humanity. 161 

embraces and subordinates even that which seems 
to resist it. Whether such a faith in its widest 
sense is still possible to man, or whether Christ- 
ianity is the last vanishing form of it, and we 
have now to look about for such substitute for it 
as may still be within our reach, may be a ques- 
tion. But it can scarcely be questioned, that 
the Comtist-, worship of Humanity is only such a 
substitute, and not the thing itself. Religion, as 
Comte himself maintains, implies a combination of 
spontaneity in the worshipper with complete sub- 
mission and self-surrender to the higher power that 
controls his life — a combination which can be 
attained only by one who loves the power to 
which he submits. But man's life is ultimately 
limited and determined by cosmical and physical 
conditions, and in these Comte sees only a fatality 
which cannot possibly be made the object of love. 
This difficulty, as we have seen, he tries to escape 
by showing that the ultimate fatality is mediated 
to us by Humanity, which, in the long process of 
its history, has been gradually adapting the sphere 
of our existence to our physical and moral neces- 
sities. He feels, however, that this is only a 
partial answer, and that the idea of an indifferent 



162 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

outward necessity must be a hindrance to the 
perfect combination of submission and love. 
Hence he calls in the aid of poetry to revive the 
spirit of Fetichism, and to reanimate the dead 
world by the image of benevolent divine agencies. 
" The Cultus of Space and of the Earth, complet- 
ing that of Humanity, makes us see in all that 
surrounds us the free auxiliaries of Humanity." 
Comte therefore ends in what some one has called 
the system of " spiritual book-keeping by double 
entry," in which imagination is allowed to revive, 
for practical purposes, the fictions which science 
has destroyed. In this way poetry has not 
merely to give sensuous form and life to our creed, 
by enabling us to see in the part what reason 
could otherwise find only in the whole ; it has 
also to supply the defects of a truth which is too 
hard and painful to satisfy the heart of man. It 
has to make us forget in our worship the dualism 
of Nature and Humanity, and to reconcile us to 
Fate by giving it the semblance of a Providence. 
It is obvious that poetry is thus made into a kind 
of deliberate superstition, which stimulates the 
outflow of religious feeling by hiding from us, for 
the moment, the realities of our position. But 



An Artificial Religion. 103 

the explanation is that Comte was driven by the 
ultimate development of his own thought to seek 
for a kind of unity in the universe, which yet he 
could not admit without recognizing the error of 
his original presuppositions. There is a certain 
irony of fate in the process of unconscious 
dialectic, by which Comte, the enemy of theology, 
was led to set up that strange "Trinity in Unity," 
which is the last word of Positivism. 

In Comte's re-construction of religion there rts artificial 

character. 

seems to be something artificial and factitious, 
something " subjective," in the bad sense. It is a 
religion made, so to speak, out of malice prepense. 
" We have derived," he seems to say, " from the 
experience of our own past and of the past of hu- 
manity, a clear idea of what a religion should be : 
and we also know from the same experience that, 
without a religion, we cannot have that fulness of 
spiritual life of which we are capable. Go to, let 
us make a religion, as nearly corresponding to the 
definition of religion as modern science will permit. 
' Gather up the fragments that remain, that noth- 
ing be lost.' God, the Absolute Being, is hidden 
from us, but Humanity will serve for a ' relative ' 
or ' subjective ' kind of God : or rather not Hu- 



164 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

inanity, but the selected members of the race, 
whose services entitle them to our recognition, 
and whom therefore we incorporate in the ' Great 
Being.' And as for the inscrutable fatality that 
bounds all our views, and on which in the last 
resort the fate of humanity must depend, to it we 
can but submit, or (since such a separation of 
submission from love is so far irreligious) we can 
invoke the powers of imagination to hide it from 
our eyes. To Humanity, as represented to us by 
the good and wise of the past, we can present the 
old offerings of praise and prayer, in a spirit that 
is perfectly disinterested ; for we have no reason 
to believe that they exist except in our memory 
of them, or that the ' Great Being,' in whom they 
are incorporated, has any gift to bestow upon us 
in the future except a similar life in the memory 
of others. For, after all, the ' Great Being,' who 
alone makes things work together for our good and 
whom alone we can love, is not absolute or objec- 
tive ; and of the real Absolute Being or Principle 
of the Universe, we know nothing, except per- 
haps that He or It is not what men call good." 
a relative I n the earlier part of this chapter I have tried 

religion is 

no religion, to show that Comte's view of the limits of know- 



Meligion must be Absolute. 1(J5 

ledge cannot be maintained except on principles 
which would be fatal to the existence of know- 
ledge altogether ; and, on the other hand, that 
the possibility of a subjective synthesis, such as 
he demands and supposes himself to have 
achieved, wtould involve also the possibility of 
an objective or absolute synthesis. Here I wish 
only to point out, that if Comte's general view of 
things be admitted, religion, according to his 
own definition of it, is impossible. A " relative " 
religion is not a religion at all : it is at best a 
morality, trying to gather to itself some of the 
emotions which were formerly connected with 
religious belief. If there is no warrant for the 
Christian faith which finds God in man, and 
man in God, which makes us regard the 
Absolute Being as finding his best name and 
definition in what we most reverence and love; 
or, what is the same thing from the other side, 
makes us see in that growing idea of moral 
perfection, which is the highest result of human 
development, the interpretation or revelation of 
the Absolute ; then we must give up the hope 
of the renewal of religion, and of that har- 
monious energy to which religion alone can 



166 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

awake the soul of man. In this point of view 
Mr. Spencer and Comte seem to divide the 
elements of the truth between them, Mr. 
Spencer, regarding the Absolute as unknowable, 
and perceiving that religion implies a relation 
to the Absolute, reduces religion to the bare 
feelings of awe and mystery. Comte, also re- 
garding the Absolute as unknowable, seeks to 
find an object nearer home for the emotions 
that hitherto have been directed to God. But 
the religion of Mr. Spencer, if it ever could 
become a reality, would be a renewal of the 
superstitious pantheism of India, the worship 
of a power without moral or spiritual attributes. 
And the religion of Comte could scarcely be- 
come more than a pious aspiration, unless the 
poetic license of worship were carried to the 
point of self-deception. Of this Comte seems 
to be partially aware, when in his latest works 
he insists so strenuously on the theme that 
art, rather than science, is the true field for 
man's intelligence, and that it is a desirable 
and useful thing to allow our minds to dwell 
on ideal conceptions, which are beyond the reach 
of scientific proof, provided these conceptions are 



Poetry and Truth. 167 

favourable to the development of altruistic senti- 
ment. " The logic of religion," he declares, 
" when freed from scientific empiricism, will not 
restrain itself any longer to the domain of hy- 
potheses winch are capable of verification, though 
these alone were compatible with the Positive 
preparation for it. It must in the end find 
its completion in the domain, much wider and 
not less legitimate, of those conceptions which, 
without offending the reason, are peculiarly 
suited to develop the feelings. Better adapted 
to our moral wants, the institutions of true 
Poetry are as harmonious as those of sound 
Philosophy with the intellectual conditions of 
the relative synthesis. They ought therefore 
to obtain as great extension and influence in 
our efforts to systematize our thoughts ; and 
Positivism permits of their doing so without 
any danger of confusion between the two dis- 
tinct methods of thinking, which it openly 
consecrates, the one to reality and the other 
to ideality." # Is it possible to express more 
clearly a desire to combine the advantages of 
believing, with the advantages of disbelieving, 

* Synthese Subjective, p. 40. 



168 The Social Philosophy oj Comte. 

in the accordance of objective reality with our 
highest feelings and aspirations ? But a worship 
of fictions, confessed as such, is impossible. Art, 
indeed, is kindred with Eeligion ; and Art, as 
Plato said, is " a noble untruth." This, however, 
means only that Art is untrue to the immediate 
appearances of things, in order that it may sug- 
gest the deeper reality that underlies them. But, 
in Comte's view, the service of imagination is 
to supply wants of the heart, which cannot be 
supplied by reality, either in its superficial or 
in its deeper aspect ; it is to nurture our 
moral nature on conceptions that are purely 
fictitious. It is not difficult to prophesy that 
the schism of the head and the heart thus 
introduced must end in the sacrifice either of 
the one or of the other ; either in the dogmatic 
assertion of the optimism of poetry, or in a 
violent recoil from it, which will separate, not 
only man from the world, but also the individual 
from the race, and which must ultimately reduce 
Humanity from an object of worship into a 
purely moral ideal. For religion, as Comte 
himself rightly saw, cannot exist except where 
thought and feeling, intelligence and heart, are 



The Religious Consciousness. 1G9 

harmonized, in a consciousness of the highest 
subjective ideal, as being at the same time the 
ultimate objective reality. What, indeed, is the 
use of religion, if it does not plant our feet 
upon the Bock of Ages," but leaves us still 
on the " sandbank " of the contingent and the 
temporal ? " All the nations," says Hegel, "have 
felt that the religious consciousness was that in 
which they possessed truth, and it is for this 
reason that they have ever regarded it as that 
which gives dignity and consecrated joy to their 
lives. All that awakes doubt and anguish, all 
sorrow and care, all the limited interests of 
finitude, the religious spirit leaves behind on 
the sandbank of time. And as, on the highest 
top of a mountain, removed from definite view 
of the earth below, we peacefully overlook all 
the limitations of the landscape and the world, 
so, to the spiritual eye of man in this pure 
region, the hardness of immediate reality dis- 
solves into a semblance, and its shadows, differ- 
ences, and lights are softened to eternal peace 
by the beams of the spiritual sun." If we 
cannot any longer have this consciousness of 
things sub specie ceternitatis, — in that highest 



of Comte. 



170 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

truth and unity in which all difficulties and 
dissonances are lost, — -without self-deception, it 
would be better for us to forswear it alto- 
gether than to connect our highest feelings 
with a poetic illusion. 
schisms in It is a natural question to ask whether 

the school 

and how far the history of Comte's philosophy 
illustrates any of the difficulties and contradic- 
tions which we have found in the writings of 
its author. The first schism in the ranks of 
those who are commonly called Positivists was 
that which is connected in France with the 
name of Littre, perhaps the most distinguished 
of Comte's disciples ; and in England, with 
the names of Mill and Lewes — who, however, 
were never, strictly speaking, his disciples at 
all. These writers broke away from Comte, 
whenever Comte decidedly broke away from 
the individualistic philosophy of the last cen- 
tury. In their eyes Comte's great achieve- 
ments were the law of the three stages of 
mental development and the arrangement of 
the sciences ; and if they accepted his sociolo- 
gical speculations — even those which appear in 
his first great work — it was with many reserves. 



Mill and Littre. 171 

Mill regards Comte's continual denunciation of 
metaphysics as objectionable, so soon as lie 
finds it to be directed against the individ- 
ualists * as well as against the scholastic realists ; 
and he thinks Comte's " inordinate demand for 
unity and systematization " only an instance of 
" an original mental twist very common in 
French writers, and by which Comte was dis- 
tinguished above them all."t Littre finds little 
to object to in Comte's first great work, and 
is not unwilling to admit that the "individual 
man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing 
real but humanity ; " but he recoils when Comte 
begins to speak of the " Great Being," and to 
change his philosophy into a religion. Both 
attack the " subjective synthesis " as a new 
variety of metaphysics, seeing clearly that, as 
Comte states it, it involves a desertion of the 
point of view of science ; and neither of them 
is able to admit any other point of view from 
which the subjective unity might itself be seen 
to be objective. 

A less important schism has recently t occurred Mr.congreve 

1 J + and M. Lafitte. 

* Mill's Comte and Positivism, p. 73. 
t Id. p. 140. X Written in 1879. 



1 72 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

within the Positivist Church, or, in other words, 
among those who accept the system of Comte in 
its entirety, as a religion no less than as a 
philosophy. Mr. Congreve, and those who think 
with him, have broken away from the general 
body of Positivists under M. Lafitte, who was 
appointed to be its head, or, at least, its pro- 
visional head, after the death of Comte. The 
difference, however, is one only of policy, and 
not of principle. " There exists no difference," 
says Mr. Congreve, " in regard to the doctrine, 
taken as a whole ; it is only as to the manner 
of presenting that whole that we are, at variance." 
At the same time this " schism," though, as M. 
Lafitte says, it is not a "heresy," might 
easily lead to one, if there be any truth in 
what has been said above as to the ultimate 
opposition of poetry and philosophy in the sys- 
tem of Comte. M. Lafitte contends that the 
Positivist priesthood should, in the first instance 
at least, seek to address the heart through the 
intelligence ; " for it is clear that their direct 
sentimental (or moral) action would want a 
basis, and could indeed have no serious result, 
unless general opinion had previously been 



Methods of Religious Teaching. 173 

modified to a certain degree by Positive teaching." 
On the other hand, Mr. Congreve argues that 
Positivism rnust triumph in the first instance, 
like Christianity, by a direct " appeal to the 
women and the proletaries " ; which means 
that an effort must be made to influence " the 
heart," without waiting for the intelligence ; and 
that, in the words of Comte himself, the "weapon 
of persuasion is to be used in preference to that 
of conviction." " What we seek to constitute," 
says Mr. Congreve, # " is a union of the faithful, 
a Church in the highest sense of the term, i.e.. 
a society in which the religious element will 
preponderate ; will, indeed, be so decisively 
and boldly emphasized, as to leave no doubt of 
our intentions; a society which can rally to 
itself all who feel the need of shelter or sup- 
port, of the consolation of an active and sym- 
pathetic faith. It is thus that we conceive 
ourselves bound to commence the preaching of 
Humanity, as a principle of union, with the 
view of gathering together a solid body, made 
up mainly of the women and the populace, 

* I translate from the French, as I have not seen the 
English edition of Mr. Congreve's circular. 



174 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

which may serve as a foundation for the rest. 
In this body the order of instructors could find 
their support (and by an order of instructors 
I mean naturally a priesthood and priests, and 
not, what seems to be offered in its place, pro- 
fessors and a professoriate), as, on the other 
hand, without the stimulating reaction of such 
an audience, they would want a solid basis as 
well as a sphere of activity." It would be an 
impertinence for any one who is not a member 
of the Positivist Church to say anything on 
the personal or semi-private questions, which 
are necessarily involved in such a division as 
this between those who are otherwise united. 
But there can be no intrusion in saying, that 
if Positivism is ever to become an effective 
Church, it must find some such direct way 
of addressing the people as Mr. Congreve sug- 
gests, without waiting for those who have time 
to be instructed in the principles of the six 
or seven sciences of the Positivist system ; and 
Mr. Dix Hutton* has sufficiently shown that 

* I have to offer to Mr. Dix Hutton my best thanks 
for his courtesy in furnishing me with copies of the 
circulars and letters of himself, of Mr. Congreve, and of 



The Heart and the Head, 175 

Comte himself would have approved of such 
a policy. " God hath chosen the weak things 
of the world to confound the mighty;" and it 
may be safely said that no great moral or 
spiritual movement will ever be accomplished, 
if its leaders wait till they have convinced the 
mass of the educated classes. The only ques- 
tion which suggests itself to one who has 
considered the difficulties of the " subjective, 
synthesis " is, whether the appeal made to the 
heart would not necessarily contain elements 
which afterwards it would be impossible to 
justify to the head. For if it were so, " the 
old quarrel of the poets and the philosophers," 
of faith and reason, would repeat itself again 
in the Positivist Church, and it would not be 
less bitter from the fact that that Church was 
founded expressly with the design of putting 
an end to the quarrel altogether. 

Can there be a division of the intelligence against Thc heart 

and the 

the heart, which is not more properly described head, 
as division of the intelligence against itself ? 
This is a question which is inevitably suggested 

M. Lafitte, on the subject of the division among the 
Positivists. 



170 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

by the whole tenor of Comte's later works. In 
my final chapter I shall say something upon 
this question, and shall then try to show how 
Comte's defective answer to it naturally led 
to other defects in his view of the history of 
the past, especially of Christianity, and also 
in his view of the social ideal of the future. 



The Subjective Synthesis. 177 



CHAPTER IV. 

oomte's view of the relation of the intellect 

to the heart its effect on his conception 

of history and of the social ideal. 

The necessity for unity in man's intellectual and moral life — 
Nature of the conflict between the intelligence and the heart- 
It is really a conflict of intelligent with itself— Criticism oj 
Comte , s doctrine that the intelligence must he subjected to the 
heart — Its effect upon his conception of history, especially of 
the history of Christianity — The two elements in Christianity, 
their conflict, and reconciliation in its development — The nega- 
tive tendencies of media-ral Catholicism and the posit ire ten- 
dencies of the modem era — Comte's imperfect conception of the 
Reformation and the Revolution — His restoration of the 
med'mval ideal — His general position as a Philosopher. 

In the last chapter I considered the subjective 

synthesis of Comte, or in other words, his attempt 

to systematize human knowledge in relation to 

the moral life of man. For it is his view, as we 

have seen, that science can never yield its highesl 

fruit to man unless it he systematized — i.e., 
M 



178 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

unless its different parts be connected together 
and put in their true place as parts of one whole. 
Scattered lights give no illumination ; it is the 
esprit d'ensemble, the general idea in which our 
knowledge begins and ends, that ultimately deter- 
mines the scientific value of each special branch 
of knowledge. But while synthesis is necessary, 
it is not necessary, according to Comte, that the 
synthesis should be objective. The error of 
mankind in the past has been that they sup- 
posed themselves able to ascertain the real or 
objective principle, which gives unity to the 
world, and able, therefore, to make their system 
of knowledge an ideal repetition of the system 
of things without them. Such a system, how- 
ever, is entirely beyond our reach. The con- 
ditions of our lot, and the weakness of our 
intelligence, make it impossible for us to tell 
what is the real principle of unity in the world, 
or even whether such a principle exists. The 
attempts to discover it, made by Theology and 
Metaphysics, have been nothing more than elab- 
orate anthropomorphisms, in which men gave 
to the unknown and unknowable reality a form 
which was borrowed from their own nature. They 



Hoiu to Systematize Knowledge. 179 

saw in the clpuds about them an exaggerated and 
distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded 
this Brocken spectre as a controlling power 
whose activity was the source and explanation 
of everything. Positivism, on the other hand, 
arises whenever men come to recognize the 
nature of this illusion, and to confine their 
ambition to that which is within the limit of 
their intelligence. All that we can know is the 
resemblances and successions of phenomena, and 
not the things in themselves that are their 
causes; and if we seek to find a principle of unity 
fi >r these phenomena, we must find it in ourselves 
and not in them. We must organize knowledge 
with reference to our own wants, rather than 
with reference to the nature of things. We 
must regard everything as a means to an end, 
which is determined by some inner principle in 
ourselves — not as if we supposed that the world 
and all that is in it were made for us, or found 
its centre in us — but simply because this is the 
only point of view from which we can syste- 
matize knowledge, as it is indeed the only 
point of view from which we need care to 
systematize it. 



180 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
Necessity of It may be asked why system is necessary at 

unity and 

system. a r^ w ] 1 y we s i 10u i(j no £ De content with a frag- 
mentary consciousness of the world, without 
attempting to gather the dispersed lights of 
science to one central principle. To critics like 
J. S. Mill Comte's effort after system seems to 
be the result of an " original mental twist very 
common in French thinkers/' of " an inordinate 
desire of unity." " That all perfection consists in 
unity, Comte apparently considers to be a maxim 
which no sane man thinks of questioning: it never 
seems to enter into his conceptions that any one 
could object ab initio, and ask, why this universal 
systematizing, systematizing, systematizing. Why 
is it necessary that all human life should point but 
to one object, and be converted into a system of 
means to a single end?"* To this Mr. Bridges 
answers that unity in Comte's sense is " the first 
and most obvious condition which all moral and 
religious renovators, of whatever time and country, 
have by the very nature of their office set them- 
selves to fulfil." -j- In other words, all moral and 
spiritual life depends upon the harmony of the 

* " Comte and Positivism," p. 140. 

+ " The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine," p. 26. 



The Weakness of Douht. 181 

individual with himself and with the world. A 
divided life is a life of weakness and misery, nor 
can life be divided intellectually, without being, 
or ultimately becoming, divided morally. Such 
unity, indeed, does not exclude — and in a being- 
like man who is in course of development cannot 
altogether exclude — difference and even conflict. 
In the most steadily growing intellectual life 
there are pauses of difficulty and doubt ; in the 
most continuous moral progress there are con- 
flicts with self and others. But such doubts and 
difficulties will not greatly weaken or disturb us, 
so long as they are partial, so long as they do 
not affect the central principles of thought and 
action, so long as there is still some fixed faith 
which reaches beyond the disturbance, some cer- 
titude which is untouched by the doubt. If, 
however, we once lose the consciousness that 
there is any such principle, or if we try to rest 
on a principle which we at the same time feel to 
be inadequate, our spiritual life, in losing its 
unity or harmony with itself, must at the same 
time lose its purity and energy. It must become 
fitful and uncertain, the sport of accidental influ- 
ences and tendencies; it must lower its moral 



182 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

and intellectual aims. This, in Comte's view, is 
what we have seen in the past. The decay of 
the old faiths, and of the objective synthesis 
based upon them, has emancipated us from many 
illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspira- 
tion out of our lives. It has made knowledge a 
thing for specialists who have lost the sense of 
totality, the sense of the value of their particular 
studies in relation to the whole ; and it has made 
action feeble and wayward by depriving men of 
the conviction that there is any great central aim 
to be achieved by it. And these results would 
have been still more obvious, were it not that 
men are so slow in realizing what is involved 
in the change of their beliefs ; were it not that 
the habits and sympathies developed by a creed 
continue to exist long after the creed itself has 
disappeared. In the long run, however, the 
change of man's intellectual attitude in relation 
to the world must bring with it a change of 
his whole life. Ceasing to have faith in the 
creed which once reconciled him to the world 
and bound him to his fellows, he must be 
thrown back upon his own mere individuality, 
unless he can find another creed of equal or 



The Weakness of Individualism. 183 

greater power to inspire and direct his life. 
And mere individualism is nothing but anarchy. 
This, indeed, was not seen by those who first 
expressed the individualistic principle ; on the 
contrary, they seemed to themselves to find 
in the assertion of individual right, not only 
an instrument for destroying the old faith and 
the old social order, but also the principle of 
a better faith, and the means of reconstructing a 
better order of life. But to us who have outlived 
the period when it could be supposed that the 
destruction of old, involves in itself the con- 
struction of new, forms of life and thought, it 
cannot but be obvious that the principles of 
private judgment and individual liberty are noth- 
ing more than negations. For, as the real 
problem of our intellectual life is how to rise 
to a judgment which is more than private judg- 
ment, so the real problem of our practical life 
is how to realize a liberty that is more than 
individual license. Hence it is that Comte 
speaks of the last three centuries as a period 
of the insurrection of the intellect against 
the heart, an expression by which he means 
to indicate at once the gain and the loss of 



184 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the revolutionary movement : its gain, in so far 
as it emancipated the intelligence from super- 
stitious illusions : and its loss, in so far as it 
destroyed the faith which was the bond of social 
union, without substituting any other faith in 
its room. At the same time, this expression 
points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, 
which affects his whole view of the history, 
and especially of the religious history, of man ; 
and which it is therefore necessary to subject 
to a careful examination. 
Possibility I s ^ possible for the intellect to be in insur- 

of conflict . ... - , 

between rection against the heart { In the sense already 

inteliectand 

heart. indicated this is possible. It is possible, in short, 
that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief 
may still control the life of one who, so far as his 
explicit consciousness is concerned, has renounced 
it. Eooted as the individual is in a wider life 
than his own, it is often but a small part of him- 
self, that he can bring to distinct consciousness. 
Further, so little are most men accustomed to 
self-analysis, that they are seldom aware what it 
is that constitutes the inspiring power of their 
beliefs. Generally, at least in the first instance, 
they take their creed in gross, without distinguish- 



The Heart against the Head. 185 

ing between essential and unessential elements. 
They confuse, in one general consecration of re- 
verence, the primary principles, which give it its 
real spiritual value, and the local and temporary 
accidents of the form in which it was first pre- 
sented to them ; and they are as ready to accept 
battle a Vovtrance for some useless outwork as for 
the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they 
are ready to think that the citadel is lost when 
the outwork is taken ; to suppose, e.g., that the 
spiritual nature of man is a fiction, if he was not 
directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, 
or that the Christian view of life has ceased to be 
true, if a doubt can be thrown on the possibility 
of proving miracles. Yet, however little the indi- 
vidual may be able to separate the particulars 
which are assailed from the universal with which 
they are accidentally connected, his whole nature 
must rebel against the sacrifice which logical con- 
sistency seems in such a case to demand from 
him. It is a painful experience when the first 
1 ireak is made in the implicit unity of early faith, 
and it is painful just in proportion to the depth 
of the spiritual consciousness which that faith has 
produced in the individual. Unable to separate 



186 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

that which he is obliged to doubt from that in 
which lies the principle of his moral, and even of 
his intellectual, life, he is " in a strait betwixt 
two " ; and no course seems to be open to him 
which does not involve the surrender, either of his 
intellectual honesty, or of that higher conscious- 
ness which alone " makes life worth living." Such 
a crisis is commonly described as a division be- 
tween the heart and the head, because in it the 
articulate or conscious logic is generally on the side 
of disbelief, while the resisting conviction takes the 
form of a feeling, an impulse, an intuition, which 
the individual has for himself, but which 
he is unable to communicate in the same 
force to another. And, as such feelings and 
intuitions of the individual are necessarily 
subject to continual variation of intensity and 
clearness, so the struggle between doubt and 
faith may be long and difficult, the objections, 
which at one time seem as nothing, at another 
time appearing to be almost irresistible. Not 
seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth 
is given to revolt, and the rest of existence to a 
faith which vainly strives to be implicit. There 
is, indeed, no final and satisfactory issue from 



The Heart Wiser than the Head 187 

such an endless internal debate and conflict, until 
the " heart " has learned to speak the language of 
the " head," — i.e., until the permanent principles, 
which underlay and gave strength to faith, have 
been brought into the light of distinct conscious- 
ness, and until it has been discovered how to 
separate them from the accidents, with which at 
first they were necessarily identified. The hard 
labour of distinguishing, in the traditions of the 
past, between the germinative principles, out of 
which the future must spring, and those external 
forms and adjuncts, which every day is making 
more incredible, must be undertaken by any one 
who would restore the broken unity of man's life. 
We begin our existence under the shadow and in- 
fluence of a faith which is given to us, as it were. 
in our sleep ; but in no age, and in this age less 
than any other, can man possess spiritual life as 
a gift from the past without reconquering it for 
himself. 

In this sense, then, we can understand how i !c:l i nature 

of the 

Cointe might speak of an insurrection of the in- opposition, 
telligence against the heart, which must be quelled 
ere the normal state of humanity could be re- 
stored ; for this would be only another way of 



188 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

saying that, in the modern conflict of faith and 
reason, the substantial truth, or at least the most 
important truth, had, up to Comte's own time, been 
on the side of the former. In this view, the deep 
unwillingness of those nourished in the Christian 
or Catholic faith to yield to the logical battery of 
the Encyclopaedists was not merely the result of an 
obscurantist hatred of light ; it was also in great 
part due to a more or less definite sense of the 
moral, if not the intellectual, weakness of the 
principles which the Encyclopaedists maintained. 
For,, while the insurrection was justified in so far 
as it asserted the claims of the special sciences, it 
was to be condemned in so far as it involved the 
denial of all synthesis whatever, and also in so far 
as it was blind to the elements of truth in the 
imperfect synthesis of the past. It thus tended 
to destroy the spirit of totality and the sense of 
duty (/ 'esprit d'ensemble et le sentiment clu devoir).*' 
It practically denied the existence of any universal 
principle which could connect the different parts 
of knowledge with each other, of any general aim 
which could give unity to the life of man. Its 
analytic spirit was fatal, not only to the fictions 
*Pol. Pos. iii. 499 : Trans. 419. 



Can Heart contradict Head? 189 

of theology, but also to that growing consciousness 
of the solidarity of men of which theology had 
been the accidental embodiment. The reluctance 
of religious men to admit the claims of what ap- 
peared to be, and, indeed, to a certain extent was, 
light, was thus due to a more or less distinct per- 
ception that their own creed, amid all its partial 
errors, contained a central truth more important 
than all the partial truths of science. In clinging 
to the past they were preserving the germ of the 
future, and the final victory of science could not 
come until this germ had been disengaged from 
the husk of superstition under which it was hid- 
den. Till that was done, the logic of the heart 
in clinging to its superstitions was better than the 
logic of the head in rebelling against them. In 
other words, the implicit reason of faith was wiser 
than the explicit reason of science. 

But this is not all that Comte means. For him Feeling apart 

from intelli- 

the appeal to the heart is not merely the appeal to g^g^Se 
feelings and intuitions, which are the result of 
the past development of human intelligence, ami 
especially of the long discipline by which the 
( Jhristian Church has moulded the modern spirit ; 
it is an appeal to the altruistic affections, as ori- 



190 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

ginal or " innate " tendencies in man which are 
altogether independent of his intelligence. It is 
not that the reason of man often speaks through 
his feelings, but that feeling and reason have in 
themselves different, and even it may be opposite 
voices. In this sense, the attempt has often 
been made in modern times to stop the invasions 
of critical reflection by setting up the heart as 
an independent authority. From the Lutheran 
theologian who said, " Pectus theologum facit" 
down to the poet of In Mcmoriam, appeals have 
constantly been made to the feelings to resist 
the intrusion of doubt : — 

" If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 

I heard a voice, ' believe no more ' . . . 

A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath, the heart 

Stood up and answered, ' I have felt ' : " 

Such appeals, however, cannot be regarded as other- 
wise than provisional and self-defensive. " The 
heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger 
doth not intermeddle with its joy ; " but just for 
that reason it has no general content or indepen- 
dent authority of its own. Whether the phrase 
"I feel it" mean little or much, depends upon the 



The Heart by itself says Nothiny. 191 

individual who utters it. It may bo the con- 
centrated expression of a long life of culture and 
discipline, or it may he the loud but empty voice 
of untrained passion and prejudice. The "un- 
proved assertions of the wise and experienced," 
as Aristotle tells us, have great value, especially 
in ethical matters ; but it is not because they 
are unproved assertions, but because we know 
that the speakers are wise and experienced. 
To appeal to the heart in general, without 
saying " whose heart," either means nothing, 
or it means an appeal to the natural man, 
i.e., to man as he is before he has been sophisti- 
cated by culture and experience. But of the 
natural man, in this sense, nothing can be said. 
The farther we go back in the history of the 
individual or the race the more imperfect does 
their utterance of themselves become ; and 
when we reach the beginning, we find that 
there is no manifestation or utterance at all. 
The natural man of Eousseau was simply an 
ideal creation, inspired with that intense and 
even morbid consciousness of self and that fixed 
resolve to submit to no external law, which were 
characteristic of Eousseau himself, and which in 



192 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

him were the last product and quintessence of 
the individualism of the eighteenth century. 
The simplicity of this ideal figure is not the 
first simplicity of nature, but the simplicity of a 
spirit which has returned upon itself and asserted 
itself against the world; a kind of simplicity 
which never existed, at least in the same form, 
before the great Protestant revolt. The unhis- 
torical character of this idea becomes doubly 
evident when we find that, as time goes on, 
and the spirit of the age alters, the qualities 
of the natural man are also changed. To St. 
Simon and Fourier, as to Rousseau, man is good 
by nature, and it is bad institutions or bad ex- 
ternal influences which are the source of all the 
ills that flesh is heir to. But while to the 
latter the natural man is a solitary, whose chief 
good lies in the preservation of his independence; 
to the former he is essentially social, and what 
is wanted for his perfection and happiness is 
only to contrive an outward organization in which 
his social sympathies shall have free play. 
Comte, as we might expect, rises above these 
imperfect theories, in so far as he refuses to 
attribute all the evils of humanity to its external 



The Natural Man. 193 

circumstances ; but he does not free himself from 
the essential error which was common to them all, 
the error of seeking for the explanation of the 
higher life of humanity in the feelings of the 
natural man — feelings which are prior to, and 
independent of, the exercise of his reason, and 
which supply all the possible motives for that 
exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of 
" innate " feelings or desires, between which 
man's life is divided — the egoistic and the altru- 
istic tendencies, each separate from the others 
as well as from the intelligence, and having its 
"organ" in a separate part of the brain. The 
egoistic feeling's at first exist in man in far 
greater strength than the altruistic; but by the 
reaction of circumstances, and the influence of 
men upon each other, the latter have in the 
past gradually attained to greater power; and 
it is the ideal of the future to make their victor)' 
complete. Meanwhile, the intelligence is neces- 
sarily the instrument of desire, and its highest 
good is to be the instrument of altruistic as 
opposed to egoistic desire. For it has at best 
only a choice of masters, and the emancipation 

of the intelligence from the heart could mean 

N 



passion. 



194 . The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

only its becoming a slave of personal vanity.* 
Comte's appeal, therefore, is still to the natural 
man, or rather to one element in him, which, 
however, as he acknowledges, is never so weak 
as it is in man's earliest or most natural state. 
Hume's view The psychology implied in this theory is sub- 

of the rela- 
tion of rea- stantially that which found its fullest expression 

son and « *- 

in Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature." Hume, 
with that tendency to bring things to a distinct 
issue which is his best characteristic, declares 
boldly that " reason is and ought to be the slave 
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other 
office than to serve and obey them." The pas- 
sions or desires are tendencies of a definite char- 
acter which exist in man from the first ; the 
awaking intelligence cannot add to their number, 
or essentially change their nature. It can only 
take account of what they are, and calculate how 
best to satisfy them. "We speak not strictly 
and philosophically when we talk of the combat 
of reason and passion," for while reason determines 
what is true and what is false, it sets nothing 
before us as an end to be pursued and avoided. 
It does not constitute, and it cannot transform, 
*Pol. Pos. i. 421. 



The Subordination of Reason. 195 

the desires, which are given altogether apart from 
it : nor is the will anything but the strongest 
desire. When we say that reason controls the 
passions what we mean is simply that a strong 
but calm tendency of our nature, which has 
reference to some remote object, overcomes a 
violent impulse towards a present delight ; but 
for intelligence to contend with passion is, strictly 
speaking, an impossibility. 

The modifications which Comte makes in this comte's 

modification 

view of motive are comparatively trilling. He vj L . w imK 
does not, indeed, like Hume, call reason the 
slave of the passions ; rather he says that 
" T esprit doit etrc le ministre du cosur, ma/is jamais 
son eselave;" but this change of language does 
not involve any important modification of Hume's 
theory. The intelligence may give the heart 
much information about the means whereby it 
may attain its ends, but the ends have to be 
determined solely by the heart itself. In Comte's 
language the intellect is a " slave," when theology 
makes it acknowledge the existence of fictitious 
supernatural beings whose natures are in accord- 
ance with our desires, our hopes or our fears ; it 
is a " master," when it pursues its inquiries into 



196 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the phenomena of the objective world, at the bid- 
ding of an errant curiosity, without reference to 
the well-being of man ; it is in its true place as a 
" servant " when it studies the objective world 
freely, but only with reference to the end fixed 
for it by the affections. " Z'univcrs doit etre 
vtvxl%6 non pour hii-mSme, mats pour Vhomme, 
ou plutot pour VhumaniU ';" and this, Comte 
thinks, will not be done if the intelligence be 
left to itself, but only if it be made subordinate 
to the heart. To say, therefore, that the intelli- 
gence is not to be a slave but a servant, implies 
merely that it is to be left free to collect infor- 
mation about the means of satisfying the desires, 
without having its judgment anticipated by the 
imagination or the heart ; but that, on the other 
hand, it must be kept strictly to its position as an 
instrument to an end out of itself. For if it 
once emancipates itself from the yoke of feeling, 
it soon becomes altogether lawless, and disperses 
its efforts in every direction in the satisfaction of 
a vain curiosity. The intelligence, as the schol- 
astic theologians said, is in itself, or when left 
to itself, a source of anarchy and confusion ; it 
must be, not indeed the serva, but the ancilla fidei 



Tendencies of the Intellect 197 

otherwise it will defeat its own ends. The intel- 
lectual life, as such, is an unsocial, even a selfish 
existence ; for, as reason is guided by no definite 
objective aim derived from itself, it must rind its 
real motive in the satisfaction of personal vanity 
and self-conceit, whenever it is not subjected to 
the yoke of the altruistic affections. 

This theory (which, as we shall see, underlies f£g23* 

the intellect 

Comte's whole conception of history) suggests purely dis- 

] iersive ? 

two questions. It leads us to ask, in the first 
place, whether the tendencies of the intellectual 
life are thus dispersive and opposed to the social 
tendencies : and, secondly, whether the social 
tendencies in the form which they take with 
man, are not necessarily determined to be what 
they are by his intelligence. The former ques- 
tion really resolves itself into another: Is the 
intelligence of man a mere formal power of 
apprehending what is presented to it from with- 
out, so that, when it is left to itself, it can only 
lose its way amid the infinite multiplicity of 
individual objects in the external world; or does it 
carry within it any synthetic principle, any idea 
of the whole, by which it can reduce to unity and 
order the difference and confusion of phenomena? 



198 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

Against Comte's assertion that the natural ten- 
dency of the intelligence is to lose itself in 
difference without end, we might quote the 
well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency 
of the " intellectus sibi permissus " is rather to- 
wards a premature synthesis. "Intellectus hu- 
manus ex proprictate sua facile svpponit major em 
ordinem et cequalitatem in rebus quam invenit." 
Surely, if we may speak of tendencies of the in- 
tellectual life as separated from the life of feeling, 
the tendency to unity and the universal belongs 
to it quite as much as the tendency to difference 
and the particular ; just as in the life of feeling 
the tendency to isolation and self-assertion 
against others is combined with the tendency 
to society and union with others. From the 
first moment of intellectual life the world is to 
us a unity ; subjectively a unity, as all its varied 
phenomena are gathered up in the consciousness 
of one self, and objectively a unity, as every object 
and event is conceived as definitely placed hi rela- 
tion to the other objects and events in one space 
and one time. The development of knowledge is, 
no doubt, the continual detection of new differences 
and distinctions in things, but the phenomena 



Analysis and Synthesis. 199 

which are distinguished from other phenomena 
are at the same time put in relation to them. 
Nor can the intelligence find complete satisfac- 
tion until this relation is discovered to be neces- 
sary, and thus difference passes into unity again. 
Individual minds, indeed, may be more of the 
Aristotelian, or more of the Platonist, order, may 
tend more to divide what at first is presented as 
unity, or to unite what at first is presented as 
difference. But it is absurd to talk of either 
tendency as belonging, more than the other, to 
i he intelligence in itself: seeing that it is as 
much beyond the powers of thought to conceive 
of an undifferentiated unity, as to conceive of 
a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. 
In this regard, indeed, we may bring Comte as 
a witness against himself; for, while he declares 
that the sciences which deal with the inorganic 
world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, 
he at the same time maintains that the sciences 
of Biology, and, still more, of Sociology and 
Morals, are synthetic, since they deal with 
objects in which the whole is not a mere aggre- 
gation or resultant of the parts, but in which 
rather the parts can be understood only in and 



200 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

through the whole. Hence it would seem that 
the dispersive tendencies of science are confined 
to the lower steps of the scientific scale ; and that 
the final science admits and necessitates a syn- 
thesis, which is not merely subjective, but also 
objective. For Comte does not hold that we 
are to regard other men merely as means, or to 
seek to understand them only so far as is neces- 
sary for the gratification of some desire in 
ourselves as individuals. We are, on the 
contrary, to seek to know man in and for him- 
self ; and when we do so know him, we find 
that he is essentially social, and that the indi- 
vidual, as such, is a mere " fiction of the meta- 
physicians." Here again, therefore, we find 
that Comte's system ends in a compromise be- 
tween opposite tendencies of thought. As his 
subjective synthesis after all was found to be ob- 
jective, at least so far as mankind were concerned, 
so in like manner his opposition of the intellect to 
the heart turns out to be only partial ; for when 
the intelligence is directed to psychology and 
sociology, it gives us an idea of humanity, ac- 
cording to which all men are " members one of 
another." The warfare of the heart and the 



Is Altruism innate / 201 

intelligence thus resolves itself into another ex- 
pression of that dualism between the world and 
man, which we have already considered. 

The second question — whether the altruistic Are not the 

social affee- 

affections of man do not imply, or are not neces- n ^"* n,y' r " 

i-iiii c i • reason? 

sarily connected with, the development ot his 
reason or self-consciousness — is even more im- 
portant. Comte, like Hume, took all the desires, 
higher and lower, as tendencies given apart from 
the reason, which can only devise the means of 
satisfying them, and is, therefore, necessarily their 
servant. Reason itself on this view does not 
essentially affect the character of those tendencies 
which it obeys. " Cupiditas est appetitus cum 
ejusdem conscientia" says Spinoza, and immediately 
he goes on to speak as if the "conscientia" made no 
change in the character of the " appetitus." But 
if we think of appetites or desires — some of them 
tending to the good of the individual, others to 
the good of the species — as existing in an animal 
which is not conscious of a self, these appetites 
will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense 
in which we apply these terms to man. Where 
there is no ego there can be no alter ego, and 
therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The con- 



202 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

sciousness of the self as a permanent unity to which 
all the different tendencies are referred, and the 
consequent rise of a new desire for the good or 
happiness, as distinct from the desires of particular 
objects, are essential to egoism. The consciousness 
of an alter ego, i.e., of a community with others 
which makes their interests our own, and hence 
the consequent rise of a love for them, — which 
is not disinterested merely as the animal appetites 
are disinterested, because they tend directly to 
their objects without any thought of self, but dis- 
interested in the sense that the thought of self is 
conquered or transcended, — is essential to altruism. 
Each of these tendencies may coincide in its matter, 
or rather in its first matter, with the appetites ; 
viewed from the outside, they may seem to be 
nothing higher than hunger or thirst, and sexual or 
parental impulse; but their form is different. In 
becoming combined with self-consciousness, they 
are changed as by a chemical solvent, which 
dissolves and renews them ; nay, as by a 
new principle of life, whose first transformation 
of them is nothing but the beginning of a series 
of transformations both of their matter and their 
form ; so that, in the end, the simple direct ten- 



Reason as a Social Principle. 203 

dency to an object — the uneasiness which sought 
its cure without reflection either upon itself or 
upon anything else — is transmuted, on the one 
side, into a gigantic ambition and greed, which 
would make the whole world tributary to the 
lust of the individual, and, on the other side, into 
a love of humanity in which self-love is altogether 
transcended or absorbed. Neither of these, how- 
ever, nor any lower form of either is in such 
wise external to reason, that we can talk of them 
as determining it to an end which is not its own. 
Both are simply the expression in feeling of that 
essential opposition of the self to the not-self, and 
at the same time that essential unity of the self 
with the not-self, which are the two opposite, 
but complementary, aspects of the life of reason. 
And the progressive triumph of altruism over 
egoism, which constitutes the moral significance 
of history, is only the result of the fact that an 
individual, who is also a conscious self, cannot 
find his happiness in his own individual life, but 
only in the life of the whole to which he belongs. 
A selfish life is for such a being a contradiction. 
It is a life in which he is at war with himself as 
well as with others, for it is the life of a being who, 



204 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

though essentially social, tries to find satisfaction 
in a personal or individual good. His " intelli- 
gence " and his " heart " equally condemn such a 
life ; it is not only a crime but a blunder. For a 
spiritual being, as such, is one who can save his 
life only by losing it in a wider life, one who must 
die to himself in order that he may live. In the 
progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no 
necessary or possible schism between the two 
parts of his being ; but, on the contrary, the 
development of the one implies the develop- 
ment of the other. It is the more comprehensive 
idea, as well as the higher social purpose, which 
always triumphs ; and if what is called intellec- 
tual culture sometimes seems to have the worse 
in the struggle for existence, it is because it is a 
superficial or formal culture, which does not really 
represent the most comprehensive idea. 
Bearing of This leads us to observe that the opposition of 

this opposi- 
tion on the heart to the intelligence is Comte's key to 

Conites ° J 

history. the whole history of the past, especially in rela- 
tion to religion. Theology is to him a system 
growing out of a natural, though partially errone- 
ous, hypothesis, an hypothesis which in its first 
appearance was well suited to excite the nascent 



False Synthesis of Theology. 205 

intelligence and satisfy the primary affections 
of man, but which, in its further develop- 
ment, tended to secure moral and social ends 
at the expense of truth, and became more 
and more irrational as it became mure and 
more useful. Fetichism, the first religion, was 
the spontaneous result of man's primitive ten- 
dency to exaggerate the likeness of all things to 
himself. It is " less distant from Positivity " 
than any other sort of theology,* for its only error 
is that it supposes the existence of life wher- 
ever it finds activity, an error which can " easily 
be brought to the test of verification " and cor- 
rected. " We can show it to be an error, and so 
get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for 
greater generality, refers phenomena, not directly, 
to beings who are identified with them, but in- 
directly, to " wills belonging to beings purely 
imaginary," whose " existence can no more be 
decisively disproved than it can be demonstrated." 
Further, Polytheism extends to the order of 
man's life that kind of explanation which Fetich- 
ism necessarily confined to nature, because the 
latter sought to explain everything by man, and 
* Pol. Pns. iii. |). 85 : Trans, p. 71. 



206 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

never thought of man himself as requiring ex- 
planation. But this, while it has the advantage 
of bringing human life within the domain of 
speculation, at the same time reduces theology 
into a palpable instance of reasoning in a circle. 
For " humanity cannot legitimately be included 
in the synthesis of causes, from the very fact that 
its type is found in man." * Last of all comes 
Monotheism, concentrating still further the theo- 
logical explanation of the universe, but rendering 
it still more incoherent and irrational, for " the 
conception of a single God involves a type of 
absolute perfection complete in each of the three 
aspects of human nature, affection, thought, and 
action. Now, such a conception unavoidably 
contradicts itself, for either this all-powerful 
Being must be inferior to ourselves, morally or 
intellectually, or else the world which he created 
must be free from those radical imperfections 
which, in spite of Monotheistic sophistry, have 
been always but too evident. And even were 
this second alternative admissible, there would 
remain a yet deeper inconsistency. Man's moral 
and mental faculties have for their object to sub- 
# Pol. Pos. iii. p. 261 : Trans, p. 218. 



Social Uses of Theology. 207 

serve practical necessities, but an omnipotent 
Being can have no occasion either for wisdom or 
for goodness." * 

What reconciles mankind, and especially the Monotheism 

the great 

men of light and leading, to these intellectually un- instrument 
satisfactory conceptions of God, is their practical amty " 
value in extending and strengthening the social 
bond. Polytheism was superior to Fetichism, 
because it lent itself to the formation of that 
wider community, which we call the State, 
whereas Fetichism tended rather to confine 
the sympathies of men to the narrower limits 
of the family. And Monotheism was the neces- 
sary basis of that still wider society which binds 
men to each other simply as men, and apart from 
any special ties of blood or language. This at 
least was the case so long as the truth of the 
unity of humanity had not yet assumed a scien- 
tific form, and therefore still needed an external 
support. But when the sciences of sociology and 
morals arise, this external scaffolding ceases to be 
necessary, and must even become injurious, as, 
indeed, Theology at the best is ill-adapted to the 
social end it has been made to subserve. 
* Ibid. iii. p. 4.31 : Trans, p. .365. 



208 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

Though i, in This last point deserves special attention. 

mJociaf According to Comte, Theology, and above all, 
Monotheistic Theology, is a system the direct in- 
fluence of which is altogether unfavourable to the 
social tendencies, although indirectly, by the course 
of history, and through the wise modifications to 
which it has been subjected by the leaders and 
teachers of mankind, it has become the main 
instrument in developing altruism. The increas- 
ing generality of theological belief, indeed, was a 
necessary condition of the establishment of social 
unity ; but, by directing the eyes of men not to 
themselves but to supernatural beings, by making 
the issues of life turn on the favour or disfavour 
of such beings rather than on the social action 
and reaction of men upon each other, and by 
reducing this world into a secondary position, 
and subordinating its concerns to those of an- 
other world, Theology tended to dissolve rather 
than to knit closer the bonds of society. The 
relation of the individual to God isolated him 
from his fellows. Especially was this the case 
with the Christian form of Monotheism, with its 
tremendous future rewards and penalties, and the 
direct relation which it established between the 



Egoistic Tendency of Theology. 209 

soul of the individual and the infinite Being. 
" The immediate effect of putting- personal salva- 
tion in the foremost place was to create an 
unparalleled selfishness, a selfishness rendering 
all social influences nugatory, and thus tending 
to dissolve public life." * " The Christian type 
of life was never fully realized except by the 
hermits of the Thebaid," who, " by narrowing 
their wants to the lowest standard, were able to 
concentrate their thoughts without remorse or 
distraction on the attainment of salvation." f 
AVhat else, indeed, but egoism could be awakened 
by the worship of a God who is himself the 
supreme type of egoism ? For " the desires of 
an omnipotent Being, being gratified as soon as 
formed, can consist in nothing but pure caprices. 
There can be no appreciable motive either from 
within or from without. And above all, these 
pure caprices must of necessity be purely per- 
sonal; so that the metaphysical formula, To lire 
in self for self, would be alike applicable to the 
two extreme grades of the vital scale. The type 
of divinity thus approximates to the lowest stage 

* Pol. Pos. iii. p. 41 1 : Trans, p. 348. 
tlbid. iii. p. 454: Trans, p. 383. 



210 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

of animality, the only shape in which life is 
purely individual, because it is reduced to the 
one function of nutrition." * The natural result 
of such a religion was, therefore, to discourage 
the altruistic affections : as, indeed, Monotheism 
has systematically denied that such affections 
form part of the nature of man. 
How its mi- The alchemy which, according to Comte, turned 

social char- 
acter was this poison into wholesome food, was found in the 

neutralized. - 1 

altruistic affections of the teachers of mankind, 
which led them to limit and modify the doctrine 
they taught, so as to subserve man's moral im- 
provement. This, however, would not have been 
sufficient, if these teachers had not at an early 
period ceased to be a theocracy, or, in other 
words, if the practical government of mankind 
had not been wrested from their hand by the 
military classes. By this change, which con- 
tained in itself the germ of the separation 
of the Church from the State, of theory 
from practice, of counsel from command, the 
priests, prophets, or philosophers, who were 
the intellectual leaders of men, were reduced to 
that position of subordination in which alone 
* Ibid. iii. p. 446 : Trans, p. 376. 



Theology subdued to Altruism. 211 

(hey can concentrate their attention upon their 
proper work. For the influences of the intellect, 
like those of the affections, must be indirect if 
they are to be pure. "No power, especially if it 
be theological, cares to modify the will, unless if- 
finds itself powerless to control action." But 
when the theoretic class were subordinated to the 
practical class, they became the natural allies of 
the women, and, like them, had to substitute 
counsel for command. At first, indeed, their 
•subjection was too absolute* for the military 
aristocracies of Greece and Rome did not leave 
to the priesthood sufficient independence, or at 
least sufficient authority, to permit even of 
counsel. But with the rise of Catholic Mono- 
theism, supported as it was by a new revelation 
based upon the idea of an incarnation of God, the 
separation of Church and State was definitely 
established, and the intellectual life was put in 
its proper relation to the life of action. 

The consequence is that the theological priest- IIow vhvW 
hood have continually sought to counteract the thebm°£w 

humanised. 

natural influences of their doctrine by mak- 
ing additions which were inconsistent with its 
" absolute " principle, but which rendered it bet- 



212 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

ter fitted for the purpose of binding men together. 
This was especially the case under Monotheism, 
where, as we have seen, such counteraction was 
most necessary. From this source arose a series 
of supplementary doctrines, generally tending to 
connect God with man, and men with each other. 
St. Paul, " the real founder of Catholicism," took 
the first step in reducing Monotheism into a shape 
in which it could act as an " organic " doctrine : 
and his successors followed steadily in the same 
path. If the omnipotence of God raised Him 
above all human sympathy, and tended to destroy 
human sympathy in his worshippers, the doctrines 
of the Trinity and the Incarnation again brought 
God near to men, and taught them to reverence 
in themselves a humanity which was raised into 
unity with God. In the Feast of the Eucharist all 
men celebrated and enjoyed their unity with this 
exalted and deified humanity. The same infiuence, 
in its further development, led to the adoration 
of the saints, and above all of the Virgin Mother, 
in whom ■ Christian devotion really worshipped 
Humanity, in its simplest and tenderest affections. 
Finally, if benevolent sympathies were denied to 
nature, St. Paul found a place for them by attri- 



Nature and Grace. -1\'.\ 

buting them to grace, "which Thomas a Kempia 
admirably defines as the equivalent of love — 
gratw sive dilectio — divine inspiration being sub- 
stituted for human impulse."* And the struggle 
between egoism and altruism was expressed in the 
doctrines of the Fall and Redemption of mankiiid.f 
Thus the social passion which, according to the 
theory, could not lie derived from human nature, 
was conceived to flow from a divine, influence, 
and became ennobled, at least as a means of sal- 
vation, in the eyes of those who would otherwise 
have suppressed it. At the same time, as Comte 
also contends, these additions or corrections of the 
original doctrine were inconsistent or imperfect in 
themselves, and inadequate to the social purpose 
for which they were destined ; and they naturally 
disappeared whenever, by the emancipation of the 
intelligence, the immense egoism, which Mono- 
theism consecrated in God and favoured in man, 
was let loose from the bonds in which the Church 
had confined it. Protestantism was the first in- 
dication of this change; for Protestantism is hut 
an organized anarchy, and the only elements of 

* Pol. Pos. Hi. ]). 447 : Trans, p. 378. 
t Ibid. iii. p. 40!) : Trans. 346. 



214 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

order in it are derived from an instinctive conserva- 
tism, clinging to the fragments of a past doctrinal 
system which, in principle, has been abandoned- 
It contains no organic elements of its own — no 
positive contribution to the progressive life of 
humanity ; it is simply the first imperfect result 
of that metaphysical individualism which, in its- 
ultimate form, freed from all the limits of the 
Catholic system, expressed itself theoretically in 
Rousseau and Voltaire, and practically in the 
French Revolution. The hope of mankind, how- 
ever, lies in the new synthesis of Positivism, 
which alone can give due value to the innate 
altruistic sympathies of man ; for it alone can 
place on a permanent scientific basis that social 
order which the mediaeval Church attempted in 
vain to found on the essentially egoistic and 
anarchic doctrine of Monotheism. 
opposition The fundamental conception, then, which under- 

of elements 

gtonsofthe ^ es Comte's view of progress is, that every past 
religion, with the partial exception of Fetichism, 
has been an amalgam of two radically inconsist- 
ent elements, of which only one was due to the 
theological principle itself; while the other was- 
due, partly to the practical instinct of its priests, 



Two Elements in Christianity. 215 

which led them to modify the logical results of 
that principle in conformity with the social wants 
of man; and partly also to their subordinate 
position, which obliged them to use the spiritual 
means of conviction and persuasion instead of the 
ruder weapons of material force. To criticize 
this theory fully would be to re-write Comte's 
history of religion. It will be sufficient here to 
point out that his view of modern history begins 
in a false interpretation of Christianity, and ends 
in an equally false interpretation of the Protest- 
ant Reformation. 

Christianity from its origin has two aspects or Did this dis- 
cord exist in 
elements ; and if we compare it with earlier re- Christianity n 

ligions, we may call these its Pantheistic and its 
Monotheistic elements. But these elements are 
not, as Comte asserts, joined together by a mere 
external necessity. They are necessarily con- 
nected in the inner logic of the system ; nor can 
we regard one of them as more or less essential 
than the other. In the simplest words of the 
Gospels we find already expressed a sense of re- 
conciliation with God, and therefore with the 
world and self, which is alien to pure Mono- 
theism, though there is some faint anticipation of 



216 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

it in the later books of the Old Testament. For 
a spiritual Monotheism, while it awakens a con- 
sciousness of the holiness of God, and the sinful- 
ness of the creature, tends to make fear prevail 
over love, and the sense of separation over the 
sense of union. The idea of the unity of the 
Divine and the Human — an original unity which 
yet has to be realized by self-sacrifice — and the 
corresponding idea that the individual or natural 
life must be lost in order to save it, were pre- 
sented for the first time, as in one great living 
picture, in the life and death of Christ. And 
what was thus directly presented to the heart 
and the imagination in an individual, was uni- 
versalized in the writings of St. Paul and St. 
John ; in other words, it was there liberated from 
its peculiar national setting, and used as a key to 
the general moral history of man. The Messiah 
of the Jews was exalted into the Divine Logos, 
and the Cross became the symbol of an atone- 
ment and reconciliation between God and man, 
which has been made "before the foundation of the 
world," yet which has to be made again in every 
human life. The work of the first three centuries 
was to give to this idea such logical expression as 



Separation of Church and State. 217 

was then possible, in the doctrines of the Incarna- 
tion and the Trinity. It is true that this idea of 
the unity of man with God was not immediately 
carried out to any of the consequences which 
might seem to be contained in it, Tt remained 
for a time a religion, and a religion only; it did 
not show itself to be the principle of a new social 
<>r political order of life. Rather it accepted the 
<>ld order represented by the Roman Empire, and 
even consecrated it as "ordained of God," only 
demanding for itself that it should be allowed to 
purify the inner life of men. Such a separation 
of the things of Caesar and the things of God was 
i hen inevitable; for it is impossible that a new 
principle can ever lie received simply and without 
alloy into minds, which are at the same time 
occupying themselves with its utmost practical 
or even its utmost theoretical consequences. In 
Ibis sense there is much truth in what Comte says 
about the value of the separation of the spiritual 
from the temporal authority. The power of directly 
realizing a new religious principle, just because it 
draws away attention from the principle itself to 
1 he details of its practical application, is likely to 
prevent that application being either a complete or 



218 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

even a true expression of the principle. Practical 
inferences from such a principle cannot safely 
be drawn by mere logical deduction ; they will 
be drawn with certainty and effect only by those 
whose whole spiritual life the principle has 
remoulded. The decided withdrawal of the 
Christian Church from the sphere of " practical 
politics " was, therefore, not merely a necessity 
forced upon it from without ; it was a con- 
dition which its best members gladly accepted, 
because without it the inner transformation of 
man's life by the new doctrine would have been 
impossible. If Christianity had raised a servile 
insurrection it never could have put an end to 
slavery. 
Growtii of But while this withdrawal was necessary, it 

dualism in 

the middle contained a great danger ; for the inner life 

ages. o o ' 

cannot be separated from the outer life without 
becoming narrowed and distorted. Confined to 
the sphere of religion and private morality, the 
doctrine of unity and reconciliation necessarily 
became itself the source of a new dualism. What 
had been at first merely neglect of the world 
was gradually changed into hostility to worldly 
interests ; and the germs of a positive morality, 



Medicsval Asceticism. 219 

reconciling the flesh and the spirit, which appear 
in the New Testament, were neglected and over- 
shadowed in the growth of asceticism. Chris- 
tianity, even in its first expression, had a negative 
side towards the natural life of man ; while it 
lifted man to God, it yet taught that humanity 
" cannot be quickened except it die." But the 
mediaeval Church, while it constantly taught that 
humanity must die to all its natural impulses, 
had almost forgotten to hope that it could he 
quickened. Its highest morality — the morality 
of the three vows — was the negation of all social 
obligations; its science was the interpretation of a 
fixed dogma received on authority; its religion 
tended to become an external service, an opus 
operatum, a preparation for another world, rather 
than a principle of action in this. Its highest 
act of worship, the Eucharist, in which w T as 
celebrated the revealed unity of men with each 
other and with God, was reserved in its fulness 
for the clergy, and even with them was finally 
reduced to an external act by the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation, in which poetry " became logic," 
and in becoming logic, ceased to be truth. 

._ „. . , , . . . Unity of the 

JNow, Comte, seeing the working <>i this two elements 

in Chris- 
tianity. 



s 



220 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

negative tendency in mediaeval Catholicism, and 
regarding it as the natural work of Monotheism, 
is obliged to treat all the positive side of Chris- 
tianity as an external addition suggested by the 
practical wisdom of the clergy. St. Paul is 
supposed by him to have invented (and Comte'! 
language would even suggest that he consciously 
invented*) the doctrine of grace, in order to 
reconsecrate those social affections which Mono- 
theism, in its condemnation of nature, had either 
denied to exist, or, what is nearer the truth, had 
treated as having no moral value. But this only 
shows how imperfectly Comte had grasped the 
Pauline conception of the moral change which 
religion produces. The idea that the immediate 
untamed and undisciplined will of the natural man 
is not a principle of morality, and that therefore 
man must die to live, must rise above himself to be 
himself, is one which has in it nothing discord- 
ant with the claims of social feeling. It is the 
commonplace of every powerful writer on prac- 
tical ethics, from the Gospels to Thomas a 
Kempis, and from Luther to Goethe. 

* Pol. Pos. iii. p. 409 : Trans, p. 346. 



Self-realization through Self-sacrifice. 221 

" Unci .so lang du das nicht hast, 
Dieses : Stirb und Werde, 
Bist du nur ein trliber ( !ast 
Auf der dunkeln Erde,." 

St. Paul adds that this death to self is possible 
only to him in whom another than his own 
natural will lives; "so then it is not 1 that 
live, but Christ that liveth in me." Conite 
would accept the words of St. Paul with the. 
substitution of Humanity for Christ. But either 
substitution involves the negation of the natural 
tendencies, whether individual or social, in their 
immediate natural form ; and Conite himself, 
when he placed not only the sexual but even 
the maternal impulse among those that are 
merely " personal or egoistic," virtually ac- 
knowledged that the natural or instructive basis 
of the altruistic affections is not in itself moral.* 
But because he begins with a psychology which 
treats the egoistic and altruistic desires, and 
again the intellect and the heart, as distinct 
and independent entities, he is unable to do 
justice to an account of moral experience which 
involves that they are essentially related elements 

* Ibid. i. p. 72(5 : Trans, p. .*>G2. 



999 



The Social Philosophy of Gorate. 



in one whole, or necessarily connected stages of 
its development. 
Their opposi- In the form in which it was first presented, the 

tion in its 

development, teaching of Christianity was undoubtedly ambigu- 
ous, as, indeed, every doctrine in its first and 
simplest form must be. In that form we cannot, 
without limitations, call it either social or anti- 
social ; it is anti-social and ascetic, because of its 
negative relations to the previous forms of life and 
culture ; it is social and positive, in so far as in 
its primary doctrine of the unity of the divine 
and human — of divinity manifested in man and 
humanity made perfect through suffering — it 
contains the promise and the necessity of a 
development by which nature and spirit shall 
be reconciled. The progressive tendency of 
Christendom was based on the fact that from 
the earliest times the followers of Christ were 
placed in the dilemma, either of denying their 
primary doctrine of reconciliation between God 
and man and going back to pure Monotheism, or 
of advancing to the reconciliation of all those other 
antagonisms of spirit and nature, the world and 
the Church, which arose out of the circumstances 
of its first publication. And modern history is 



Development of Christianity. -2-23 

more than anything else the history of the long 
process whereby this logical necessity manifested 
itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle 
Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its 
tendency to transform the moral opposition of 
natural and spiritual into an external opposition 
between two separate worlds, present and future, 
and thus to substitute " other- wordliness " for 
worldliness, instead of substituting unwoiidliness 
for both — all these characteristics were the natural 
results of the fact that the idea of Christianity, 
in its first abstract form, could not include, and 
therefore necessarily became opposed to, the forms 
of social life and organization with which it came 
into contact. But while the early Christians 
looked for the realization of the kingdom of 
Heaven in some immediate earthly future, and 
the Middle Age postponed it to another life, 
Christ had already taught the truth, which 
alone can turn either of these hopes into some- 
thing more than the expression of an egoistic 
desire — the truth that " the kingdom of God 
is within us." The reaction of the social neces- 
sities of mediaeval society on the doctrine — which 
Comte quite correctly describes as leading to the 



224 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

gradual elevation of humanity and of human 
interests— found its main support in the prin- 
ciples of the doctrine itself, so soon as its lessons 
had been absorbed into the mind of the people. 
And the irresistible force of the movement, 
whereby at a later period the intelligence was 
emancipated from authority, and the claims 
of the family and the State were asserted 
against the Church, lay above all in this, that 
Christianity itself was felt to involve the 
consecration of human life in all its interests 
and relations. Luther's appeal to the New 
Testament and to the earliest ages of Chris- 
tianity was in some ways unhistorical, but it 
expressed a truth. Protestantism was not a 
return to the Christianity of the first century; it 
was an assertion of the relation of the individual 
to God, which was itself made possible only by 
the long work of Latin Catholicism. But the 
development of a doctrine, if it has in it any 
germ of truth which is capable of development, 
involves a continual recurrence to its first, and 
therefore its most general, expression. The ele- 
ments successively developed in the Catholic 
and the Protestant, the Latin and the Germanic 



Self-realisation through Self-sacrifice. 225 

forms of Christianity, were both present in the 
original germ, and the exaggerated prominence 
given in the former to the negative side of 
Christianity could not but lead, in the develop- 
ment of thought, to a similarly exaggerated 
manifestation of its positive side. But it is 
nearly as absurd to say, as Comte does, that 
the true logical outcome of Christianity is to 
be found in the " life of the hermits of the 
Thebaid," as it would be to say that its true 
logical outfcome is to be found in those vehement 
assertions of nature — naked and unashamed — as 
its own sufficient warrant, which poured almost 
with the force of inspiration from the lips of 
Diderot. Both extremes are equally removed 
from that special moral temper and tone of 
feeling which we call distinctively Christian — the 
former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, 
no less than the latter by its want of purity 
and self-command. Eeassertion of nature through 
its negation, or to put it more simply, the puri- 
fication of the natural desires by the renunciation 
of their immediate gratification, is the idea that 
is more or less definitely present in all phases 
of the history of Christianity; and, though sway- 



226 The Social Philosophy of C orate. 

ing from one side to the other, the religious 
life of modern times has never ceased to present 
both aspects. Even a St. Augustine recoiled 
from the Manichseism by which nature was 
regarded, not simply as fallen from its original 
idea, but as essentially impure. And, on the 
other hand, even Eousseau's Savoyard vicar, who 
freed himself from the negative or ascetic element 
as completely as is possible for any one still 
retaining any tincture of Christianity or even of 
religion, and who insists so strongly on the 
text that " the natural is the moral," is yet 
forced to recognize that nature has two voices, 
and that the raison commune has to overcome 
and transform the natural inclinations of the 
individual. In the life of its Founder, the 
Christian Church has always had before it 
an individual type of that harmony of the 
spiritual and natural life, which it is its ideal 
to realize in all the wider social relations 
of man ; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it 
be said that the Christian idea is exhausted, 
or that the place is vacant for a new reli- 
gion, — great as may be the changes of form 
and expression through which Christianity must 



Egoism and Altruism. 227 

pass under the changed conditions of modern 
life. 

Thai (unite was not able to discern this, arose, comte'sown 

dualism. 

as we have seen, from the fact that he held to 
a kind of Manichseism of his own. To him the 
egoistic and the altruistic desires were two kinds 
of innate tendencies, both of which exist in man 
from the first, though with a great preponder- 
ance on tin- side of egoism.* Moral improvement 

* Comte insists with great force on the danger of taking 
an organism as the mere sum of its parts, or its life as 
merely the resultant of their external action and reaction 
upon each other: but in his psychological analysis, lie 
often seems to forget this principle. If he recognizes 
that, as we rise in the scale of animal life, there is a con- 
tinually advancing differentiation of the simple unity we 
find in the lowest organisms, he does not always remember 
that this implies and necessitates a correspondent integra- 
tion. Hence in the end the unity which he establishes 
between the different elements, e.g., between the intellect 
and the heart, or between the egoistic and the social ini- 
] raises, is external and artificial. In his Psychology the fact 
that it is / who think, / who feel, / who desire finds no 
sufficient place, and, therefore, in his Ethics he can reach no 
ideal except that of an external harmony of the different 
faculties and tendencies. Where the primary unity below 
the difference and conflict of the parts is not recognized, 
it becomes impossible to see beyond their antagonism to 
its reconciliation in -Ap'ital unity. 

See especially Comte's sketch of Psychology in the third 
chapter of the Introduction Fonclamentnle. Pol. Pos. i. 
685, seq. 



228 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

simply consists in altering the original propor- 
tions in favour of altruism, and moral perfection 
would be the complete extinction of egoism (which 
with Comte would naturally mean the extinction 
of all the desires classified as personal). Hence 
there is a somewhat ascetic tendency in some of 
the ideas of the Politique Positive — i.e., asceticism 
sometimes appears in it, not simply as a tran- 
sitionary process through which certain natural 
desires are to be purified, but as an attempt, so far 
as possible, to extinguish them. A deeper analy- 
sis would have shown that the desires in them- 
selves, as mere natural impulses, are neither egoistic 
nor altruistic, neither bad nor good ; and that if, 
as they appear in the self-conscious life of men, 
they are necessarily infected with egoism, yet 
that the ego is not absolutely opposed to the alter 
ego, but rather implies it. A spiritual or self- 
conscious being is one who can realize his own 
individual good only as he realizes the good of 
others : but, in seeking to realize such a good, it 
is not needful that he should renounce any 
natural desire as impure; for there is no natural 
desire which may not become the expression oi 
the better self, which is ego and alter ego in one. 



Is Christianity Other-worldliness ? 22U 

But Comte, unable from the limitations of his 
psychology to see the true relation of the negative 
and the positive side of ethics, is obliged to treat 
the ascetic tendency of Christianity as involving 
a denial of the existence in man of innate social 
sympathies ; and on the other hand, to regard the 
efforts of the Christian Church to cultivate such 
sympathies, as the result of an external accom- 
modation. His idea of Christianity practically 
coincides with the definition of virtue given by 
Paley; it is " doing good to man, in obedience to 
the will of Cod, with a view to eternal happi- 
ness." On this view the Christian life is the 
pursuit of a selfish end by means in themselves 
unselfish, or it is selfishness turned to unselfish 
iiction in view of the pleasures and pains of another 
world ; and so soon as doubt is cast upon these 
supernatural rewards and punishments, the false 
^diow of benevolence must disappear and leave 
bare selfishness in its place. Hence Comte is just 
neither to Catholicism nor to Protestantism; for, 
while he maintains the former to be only in- 
directly social, he regards the latter as the first 
step in a scepticism which, taking away the fears 
and hopes of another world, must at the same 



230 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

time take away all restraint upon selfishness. 
And, just because he is unable fully to under- 
stand either the negative spirit of the earlier, or 
the positive spirit of the later, phase of modern 
life, he has an imperfect appreciation of that 
social ideal to which both are tending, and which 
must combine in itself the true elements of both. 
Yet we cannot say that he is equally unfair to 
Catholicism and to Protestantism. It is the 
temptation of writers on social subjects to be least 
just to the tendencies of the time which precedes 
their own, and against the errors of which they 
have immediately to contend. Hence we are not 
surprised to find that Comte does more justice 
to Catholicism than to Protestantism, or to that 
Individualism which grew out of Protestantism. 
The Eeformation and what is called in German 
the Avfkldrvng he regards solely on their de- 
structive side, as successive stages in the modern 
movement of revolt, while he fails to appreciate 
the constructive elements involved in each of 
them. Hence also, in his attitude towards this 
threat movement, he all but identifies himself with 
Catholic writers like De Maistre ; and his own 
scheme of the future is essentially reactionary. 



Two Aspect* of Protestantism. 231 

The restoration of the spiritual power to its 
mediaeval position was for Conite a natural pro- 
posal, because he could see in the Protestant 
revolt nothing more than an insurrectionary 
movement, which might clear the way for a 
new social construction, but which in itself was 
the negation of all government whatever. 

But what was Protestantism ? To the Pro- The defects 

of Protes- 

testant it seemed to be simply a return to the tautis m. 
original purity of the Christian faith; to the 
Catholic, it seemed to be a fatal revolt against 
the only organization by which Christianity could 
lie realized. Really it partook of both char- 
acters. It involved a dangerous misconception of 
the social conditions, under which alone the re- 
ligious life can be realized and developed; but it 
involved also a deeper and truer apprehension of 
that religion, which first recognized the latent 
(^ivinity, or universal capacity, of every spiritual 
being as such, and, which, therefore, seemed to 
impose upon every individual man the right or 
rather the duty of living by the witness of his 
own spirit. Comte saw only the former of these 
two aspects of it. Hence he regarded the French 
Revolution as a practical refutation of the individ- 



232 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

ualism which grew out of the Protestant move- 
ment, and not, as it was in truth, a critical 
event, which forced men to distinguish and 
separate its true from its false elements. He 
drew from it, indeed, a true lesson — the lesson 
that the individual as such has no moral or 
religious life of his own, and that it is only 
in proportion as he transcends his own individu- 
ality and lives in the life of humanity, that 
his spiritual life can have any depth or riches 
in it. "We are afraid to put men to live 
and trade each on his own private stock 
of reason, because we suspect that the stock in 
each man is small, and that the individuals 
would do better to avail themselves of the 
general bank and capital of nations and of ages." 
The truth expressed in these words was seen as 
clearly by Comte as by Burke. And because 
lie saw it, Comte regarded the Protestant In- 
dividualism, which throws individuals back upon 
themselves, as tending merely to empty their 
minds of all real interests, and to deliver 
them over to their own caprices. Private 
judgment and popular government were to him 
only pretentious names for intellectual and 



ido of 

itant- 



Caiholidsm an Imperfect Christian it;/. 233 

political anarchy : and his remedy for the 
moral diseases of modern times was the restor- 
ation of that division of the spiritual and 
temporal authorities, which existed in the Middle 
Ages. 

There is, however, another aspect of the The good 

' £ side' 

Protestantism and of the apparently anarchical gg 
doctrines derived from it, to which Comte pays 
no attention. Catholicism, as we have seen. 
had developed one aspect of Christianity, until, 
by its exclusive prominence, the principle of 
Christianity itself was on the point of being 
lost. It had changed the division between laity 
and clergy, world and Church, from a relative to 
an absolute division; it had presented Christian 
doctrine, not as something which the spirit of 
the individual may ultimately verify for itself, 
but as something which it must submissively 
accept without any verification. It had made 
Christian worship into an opus operatum, a 
work done by the priest for the people, instead 
(if a means through which the feelings of the 
people could be at once drawn out and ex- 
pressed. Now, it is as opposed to these tend- 
encies that the Protestant movement had its 



234 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

highest value. Each of the so-called an- 
archic doctrines, against which Comte protests, 
has a good as well as a bad meaning. If, e.g., 
it is nothing less than intellectual anarchy 
for every individual to claim to judge for 
himself, on subjects for which he has not 
the requisite training or discipline, it is a 
slavery scarcely less corrupting in its effect 
than anarchy, when he is made to regard 
the difference between himself and his teachers 
as a permanent and absolute one. In the 
former case, he has no sufficient feeling of his 
want to make him duly submissive to teach- 
ing ; in the latter, he has no sufficient conscious- 
ness of his capacity to be taught, to permit a 
due reaction of his thought upon the matter 
received from his teachers. Again, the doctrine 
of the sovereignty of the people is the negation 
of all government and social order, if it be 
taken to mean that the uninstructed many should 
govern themselves by their own insight, and 
that the instructed few should simply be their 
servants and their instruments. But where the 
people are not recognized as the ultimate source 
of power, where their consent is not in any 



The Truth in Protestantism. 235 

regular way made necessary to the proceedings ol 
their governors, they are by that very fact kept 
in a perpetual tutelage, and cannot possibly feel 
that the life of the state is their own life. Now, 
the most important effect of the Protestant move- 
ment was just this, that it awakened in the 
individual the consciousness of his universal 
nature, or, in other words, the consciousness that 
there is no external power or sovereignty, divine 
or human, to which he has absolutely and per- 
manently to submit, but that every outward 
claim of authority must ultimately be justified by 
the inner witness of his own spirit. The freedom 
of man consists in this, that his obedience to the 
State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedi- 
ence of his natural to his spiritual self. The 
essential truth of the Reformation lay in its 
republication of the doctrine that the voice of God 
speaks not only without but also within us, ami 
indeed that " it is only by the God within that 
we can comprehend the God without." And the 
nations, which had learned that lesson in religion, 
soon hastened to apply it to the social and 
political order of life. It is undoubtedly a 
lesson which is liable to misa] (prehension, as 



236 The Social Philosophy of Oomte. 

may be seen, not only from the tendency of 
many Protestant sects to put the inner life in 
opposition to the outer, and so to deprive the 
former of all wider contents and interests ; but 
also from the ultimate substitution, by Rousseau 
and others, of the assertion of the natural, for 
the assertion of the spiritual, man. By such 
writers the mere capacity of man for a higher 
life is treated as if it were the higher life itself : 
and it is forgotten that the capacity is nothing 
unless it be realized, and that its realization 
requires the surrender of individual liberty and 
private judgment to the guidance and teaching of 
those, in whom that realization has already taken 
place. But it is not the less true that the con- 
sciousness of the capacity, and consequently 
of the duty, of becoming not merely a slave 
or instrument, but an organ, of the intellectual 
and moral life of mankind, is the essential basis 
of modern life. " Henceforth, I call ye not ser- 
vants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord 
doeth ; but I have called you friends," is a word 
of Christ which scarcely began to be verified till 
the Reformation. And while its verification can- 
not mean the negation of that division of labour 



Comte and Democracy. 237 

upon which society rests, — cannot mean that 
each one should know and judge, any more than 
that each one should do, everything for himself, 
it at least means that every power and autho- 
rity should henceforth be, in the true sense of the 
word, a spiritual power, and should, therefore, 
rest for its main support upon the opinion of 
those who obey it. It is because he has not 
appreciated this truth that Comte so decidedly 
breaks with the democratic spirit of modern 
times, and seeks to set up an aristocracy 
in the State and a monarchy in the Church. 
Yet the spirit of the age is, after all, too strong 
for him, and while he refuses to the governed 
any regular and legitimate way of reacting upon 
the powers that govern them, he recognizes that 
the vbltima ratio, the final remedy for misgovern- 
nient, lies in their irregular and illegitimate 
action. As regards the State, he declares that 
" the right of insurrection is the ultimate resource 
with which no society should allow itself to dis- 
pense." * And as regards the Church he says 
that if " the High Priest of Humanity, sup- 
ported by the body of the clergy, should go 
* Of. Pol. Pos. i. 128 seq. 



238 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

wrong, then the only remedy left would be the 
refusal of co-operation, a remedy which can never 
fail, as the priesthood rests solely on conscience 
and opinion, and succumbs, therefore, to their 
adverse sentence." The civil government, in fact, 
can bring the spiritual power to a dead-lock, by 
" suspending its stipend, for in cases of serious 
error popular subscriptions would not replace it, 
unless on the supposition of a fanaticism scarcely 
compatible with the Positive faith, where there 
is enthusiasm for the doctrines, rather than for 
the teachers."* Comte also desiderates a strong 
reactive influence of public opinion from the 
proletariate, by which the officers, both of Church 
and State, may be kept faithful to their work. 
But if this is desirable, why should the pro- 
letariate have no regular means of making their 
will felt ? An " organic " theory of the con- 
stitution of society must surely provide every 
real force with a legitimate form of expression ; 
if a social theory embodies the idea of revolution 
in it, it is self-condemned, 
comte's par- Comte's social ideal is in many respects a close 

tial revival 

if the medi- reproduction of the mediaeval system, with its 

Hval svstem. J- « 7 



seval system. 



* Pol. Pos. iv. 337 : Trans. 2.94. 



Church and State. 239 

regime dispcrsif of feudalism in the world, and 
its Papal concentration of authority in the church. 
For him, the establishment of the national State 
is as great an error in secular politics, as is the 
increasing division of labour in the spiritual 
kingdom of science. Still more strongly, if pos- 
sible, does he reprobate that mingling of the 
functions of Church and State, that interference 
of the secular authority with spiritual matters, 
such as the education of the people and 
its religious life, which has been the natural 
consequence of the failure of the mediaeval 
Church to maintain its old authority. Notwith- 
standing his worship of Humanity, the idea of a 
" parliament of man, a federation of the world," 
by which all the powers of mankind should be 
united for the attainment of the highest material 
and spiritual good, lias no attraction for him. To 
reduce the State to the dimensions of a commune, 
and to confine it to the care of purely material 
interests, is his first political proposal. France, 
England, and Spain (and we may now add Ger- 
many and Italy) are, in his view, "factitious 
aggregates without solid justification," and they 
will only become "free and durable Slates," when 



240 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

they are broken up into fragments, each with a 
population of two or three millions, and a ter- 
ritory not exceeding that of Belgium or Tuscany. 
The " West " will thus be divided into severity 
republics, and the earth into five hundred ; and 
the main work of the patriciate will be to direct 
and regulate the industrial life of the community : 
each member of the banker triumvirate, who are to 
be at the head of the State, having one of the great 
industrial departments under his special super- 
intendence. On the other hand the unity of 
humanity is to be represented solely by the 
spiritual power, in whose hands is to be left 
the whole work of advancing science, teaching 
the people, and exercising a moral censorship 
over all Governments and individuals. And 
while this spiritual power is, for practical pur- 
poses, to be strictly organized on the model of 
the mediaeval Church, it is also, like that Church, 
to remain, for scientific purposes, inorganic. In 
other words, it is to admit no division of labour 
in science, but every scientific man, like a 
mediaeval doctor, is to profess all science, adding 
to this the priestly office, which, with Comte, 
includes both the cure of souls and of bodies. 



Church and State. 241 

To criticize the details of this scheme seems separation 

of spiritual, 

to be unnecessary after what has been already a ,"^^ ul u " 
said. It is not to be denied that the division 
of Church and State in the Middle Ages was a 
most important and even a necessary condition of 
progress. Christianity could never have been 
impressed upon the minds of men, if the concrete 
application of its principles had been too rapid. 
The essential condition of such application was 
that men should not concern themselves too pre- 
maturely with it. For the consequences of a 
moral and religious principle cannot be reached 
by direct logical deduction ; it is like a living 
germ, in which, by no analysis or dissection, you 
can discover the lineaments of the future plant. 
To find out what it really is, or involves, you must 
plant it in the minds of men, and let it grow. 
Hence the mediaeval Church was strong in its 
weakness, and it was its very victories over the 
temporal power that were its greatest danger, li 
became corrupt and lost its hold upon the minds 
of men, just when it seemed to have established 
its right to an absolute supremacy. Comte, 
following De Maistre, attaches great importance 
to the position of the Popes as arbiters between 
Q 



242 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

the Sovereigns and nations of mediaeval Europe. 
But he forgets that in claiming and maintaining 
this position, the Popes were distinctly ceasing to 
be a spiritual power, if it be the function of a 
spiritual power to inculcate principles rather 
than to use them to solve practical difficulties. A 
power interfering in this way with the immediate 
struggle of interests could not but be invaded by 
the passions they excite, and it was the more 
certain to be corrupted by these passions, because 
it conceived them to be evil, and pretended alto- 
gether to renounce them. The authority acquired 
by the Church in the Middle Ages might have its 
value, as an anticipation of the peaceful federation 
of the nations under one supreme Government, 
but it was undoubtedly the first step towards the 
erasing of the distinction between the temporal 
and the spiritual power. 
Their neces- The truth* seems to be that the distinction of 

sary conflict, , , . . -. . , 

whensepar- secular and spiritual powers, except m the sense 
already indicated, is essentially irrational, and 
that the attempt to realize it in practice must 
involve, as it did involve in the Middle Ages, a 
continual internecine struggle. To set up two 
regularly constituted powers face to face with 



ated. 



The Secular and Spiritual Powers. 24o 

each other, one claiming man's allegiance in the 
name of his spiritual, and the other in the name 
of his temporal, interests, is to organize anarchy. 
So long as man's body and soul are insepar- 
able, it will be impossible to divide the world 
between Caesar and God ; for in one point of 
view all is Csesar's, and in another all is God's. 
In the Middle Ages the conflict of two despot- 
isms was necessary to the growth of freedom.; 
but, when government ceases to be despotic, the 
need for such division of power passes away. 
The relative separation between the speculative 
ami the practical classes — between the scientific 
and moral teachers of mankind, who have to dis- 
cover and inculcate principles, and the statesmen 
or administrators, who have to determine what 
improvements it is possible at a definite time 
to make in the organization of man's social and 
political life — is a division of labour which can 
surely be secured without breaking up the unity 
of the social body. It is not desirable that the 
philosopher, or priest, or man of science, should 
be king, (and we may even acknowledge that, if 
he were a king, he would probably be a very bad 
one): on the other hand, it is desirable that he 



244 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

should have his due influence, as the teacher of 
those general truths out of which all practical 
improvement must ultimately spring. But the 
natural difference of the tastes and capacities of 
men should, in a well-organized State, be suffi- 
cient to secure due influence to those who are 
the natural representatives of man's spiritual 
interests (whether they be religious, philosophic, 
or scientific), without tempting them, from their 
proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, 
to the less appropriate work of determining how 
much of it comes within " the sphere of practical 
politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as 
an independent power apart from, and outside of, 
the State, would make such a perversion ex- 
tremely probable. A hierarchy of priests under 
a despotic Pope would soon cease to be, in any 
sense, a spiritual power ; it would degenerate just 
as the Papacy degenerated in the fourteenth 
century ; and this would be only the more certain 
if, by the Comtist denunciation of specialism, the 
priests were prohibited, in their own peculiar 
sphere of scientific research, from any division of 
labour according to capacity. Por by this prohi- 
bition their attention would be diverted from 



The Church against the State. 245 

inquiries about the truth of their doctrines to 
their immediate practical application ; not to 
mention that, in the case of all but a few com- 
prehensive minds, the natural result would be an 
omniscient superficiality, which would be the 
enemy of all real culture. Deprived of its natural 
object as ° scientific order, the Comtist Priesthood 
would inevitably throw itself, with all its energy, 
into the task of directly influencing the practical 
life of men ; and, if Comte's political ideas were 
carried out, it would find itself in the presence 
of a number of communal States, none of 
them large enough to offer any effective resist- 
ance. Positivism must indeed alter human 
nature, if such a priesthood would not seek to 
make itself despotic, especially if it could wield 
such a formidable weapon as the Positivist ex- 
communication is supposed to be.* 

The truth is that Comte commits the same comte's 

social ideal 

error which misled Montesquieu when he sup- 1 1 °g a l n e ^ ly 
posed that the great security of a free State lay 
in the separation of the legislative, executive, 
and judicial powers, — i.e., in treating the dif- 
ferent organs through which the common life 
* Pol. Pos. iv. p. 292. 



246 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 

expresses itself as if they were independent 
organisms. He forgot that if such a balance 
of power was realized, the effect must either be 
an equilibrium in which all movement would 
cease, or a struggle in which the unity of the 
State would be in danger of being lost. The 
true security against the dangers involved, on the 
one hand, in the direct application of theory to 
practice, and, on the other hand, in the too 
great separation of practice from theory, must 
lie, not in giving them independent positions as 
spiritual and temporal powers, but in subordi- 
nating them to the organic unity of the whole 
society, whether it be communal, national, or 
universal. And organic unity, though it does 
not mean any special form of government, means 
at least two things : in the first place, that each 
great class or interest should have for itself a 
definite organ, and should therefore be able to act 
on the whole body in a regular and constitutional 
manner, so as to show all its force without revolu- 
tionary violence ; and, in the second place, that 
no class or interest should have such an inde- 
pendent position, as to exclude every legal or con- 
stitutional method of bringing it into due subor- 



Comte and Kant. 247 

,/dination to the common good. But Comte, losing 

] his balance in his jealousy of the individualistic 

and democratic movement of modern society, has 

built up a social ideal, which fails in both these 

points of views, and which, indeed, is a revival 

of the inorganic structure of mediaeval society. 

It would not be fair to conclude these chapters, comte's posi- 
tion as a 
which have necessarily been devoted in great part philosopher. 

to criticism and controversy, without expressing 
a sense of the power and insight which are shown 
in the works of Comte, especially in the Politique 
Positive. Controversy itself, it must be remem- 
1 >ered, is a kind of homage ; for, as Hegel says, 
" It is only a great man that condemns us to the ' 
task of explaining him." But if we can some- 
times look down upon such men, it becomes us 
to remember that we stand upon their shoulders. 
( .'< >inte seems to me to occupy, as a writer, a posi- 
tion in some degree analogous to that of Kant. 
He stands, or rather moves, between the old 
world and the new, and is broken into incon- 
sistency by the effort of transition. Like Kant, 
he is embarrassed to the end by the ideas with 
which he started, and of which he can never free 
himself so as to make a new beginning. Comte, 



24-8 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 

indeed, had only a small portion of that power 
of speculative analysis which characterized his 
great predecessor, but he had much of his 
tenacity of thought, his power of continuous 
construction; he had the same conviction of 
the all-importance of morals, and the same 
determination to make all theoretic studies 
subordinate to the solution of the moral prob- 
lem. Also, partly because he lived at a later 
time, and in the midst of a society which was 
in the throes of a social revolution, and partly 
because of the keenness and strength of his own 
social sympathies, he gives us a kind of insight 
into the diseases and wants of modern society, 
which we could not expect from Kant, and which 
throws new light upon the ethical speculations of 
Kant's idealistic successors. To believe that his 
system, as a whole, is inconsistent with itself, 
that his theory of historical progress is insuffici- 
ent, and that his social ideal is imperfect, need 
not prevent us from recognizing that there are 
many valuable elements in his historical and 
social theories, and that no one who would study 
such subjects can afford to neglect them. A 
mind of such power cannot treat any subject 



His Position as a Pliilosopher. 24!) 

without throwing much light upon it, which is 
independent of his special system of thought, and, 
above all, without doing much to show what are 
the really important difficulties in it which need 
to be solved. And, especially in such subjects, to 
discover the right question is to be half-way to the 
answer. Further, as Comte himself somewhere 
says, it is an immense advantage in studying any 
complex subject to have before us a distinct and 
systematic attempt to explain it ; for it is only 
by criticism upon criticism that we can expect to 
reach the truth, in which its different sides and 
aspects are brought to a unity. 



END. 



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